Goodbye bees, goodbye us?

Having read "The Secret Life of Bees" a year or two ago, I theorize they all got busted and are laying low for now. Seriously though, there's lots of speculation about their curious absence. I've heard everything from fungus to cell phone transmission waves.

Rod, I'm about two-thirds of the way through your book.
Given what I've read there, I'm surprised you'd be reluctant to believe generically engineered crops could cause this effect. I'm certainly not saying Frankenfood is the reason for the bees vanishing, but I do know, and this is a pretty clear principle in your writing, that we can't screw around with nature without running into unexpected consequences. So, though no one seems to be able to explain this odd development, unnatural farming practices including genetically engineered crops certainly seem suspicous to me.

Here are some thoughts: http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/2007/04/bee-crisis.html

Ugh. We need the bees? What about mosquitoes? Can we still live without them? (It's nearing Florida summertime.) God bless.

Bees are not the only source of pollination for plants, much less agriculture. As I recall from a TV show recently on the subject, honey bees are not even the majority of insects that provide pollination. Plants were being pollinated in for millennia before the honey bees were tended by man. There are wild bees out there too. Also, this isn't the first time honey bees have had catastrophic depopulating. It happened before in the 1910s and the 1940s.

I made my internet environment a Sullivan/Derbyshire free zone. One's a pedestrian middle-brow posing as a smarmy self indulgent pseudo-intellectual, and the other is a pedestrian middle-brow posing as a smarmy self indulgent pseudo-intellectual. It's amazing how much an English accent can validate the idle musings as an indolent dilettante. (I.e., a guy whose doesn't actually work for a living. Yet has an expectation of a subsidized life-style simply because he is just so brilliant in his own mind.)

From what I have read, the mites (recently discovered in Hawaii) have been around for a while, and are apparently a separate phenomenon than the "colony collapse disorder" currently bewildering people. I hope they can find what is causing the problem. Speculation ranges from cellphone interference to weakness in commercially produced and transported hives. As has been noted by others, there are wild bees of many types to assist in pollination. I like honey, so here's hoping it is resolved soon.

I have heard that Einstein never said this -- it's a false attribution. Can anyone clarify?

Einstein? this would bee his formula: bee = mc(squared)... it makes perfect sense to get into a panic about a potential ecological crisis over the words of a physicist... faith hope love joy bees to all...

That Einstein quote was debunked by Snopes awhile back.
There sure aren't a lot of people growing their own vegetable plots anymore, are there? Anyone who's ever had a little kitchen garden knows (a) Not all food plants are insect-pollinated; corn, for example, is wind-pollinated and tomato flowers are specially designed to pollinate themselves. (b) Not all insect-pollinated food plants rely on bees. Many orchardists are in a bit of a pickle, but the rest of our food supply is more or less fine. Even the plants that do normally rely on bees, such as squash, are very easy to hand-pollinate with a paintbrush. Most gardeners do that anyway so the seeds will breed true. If bees disappear from farms, it might mean that we go back to needing a larger percentage of the population working in agriculture and a much bigger supply of paintbrushes, but that's pretty much the worst-case scenario.

That Einstein quote was debunked by Snopes awhile back. No surprise. I hadn't realize that being a physicist automatically made one an expert in apiculture.

The mite infestation has been going on for several years; beekeepers would open their hives and find dead bees. The current die-off is different, in that the bees are just . . . gone. Something (GM crops?) is confusing them so they get lost and can't return to their hives.

The "killer bee swarms" stories were racist manifestations of white fear of the African, as hyper-physical Other (hence the emphasis on the number of stings the "Africanized" bees would supposedly use, a parallel to white myths and fears of black male promiscuity). This has actually been argued with a straight face.

I think our fascination with bees goes back quite awhile. See the fourth book of Vergil's Georgics. I think it's because bees live in societies that seem, in some ways, to serve as an analogue for human societies. (So do ants, but it was a lot harder for the ancients to observe ants.)

I like this quote from David Byrne's column: "Would a civilization commit suicide? You bet they would they ve done it all the time. I read Jared Diamond s book Collapse and, sure enough, according to him culture and greed trump common sense and reason every time although in many cases it took a disaster like a drought or war to push things over the tipping point." Unfortunately, all of my life experience bears this out. Perhaps it's simply part of human nature to ignore the sword(s) that are hanging over our civilization and pretend we aren't headed for disaster on many fronts. When I read about the run-up to WWI and WWII, the picture seems quite similar.
Sooner or later, the borrowed time we have been living on will run out.