You Aren't Worried

But you should be.

Here's some news for you.

Bees might not seem like a big deal to you. Some people are actually hostile to them, fearing a sting. Having dabbled in beekeeping, I can tell you that getting stung by bees is not something you need to worry about. Even if you're allergic.

They will defend their hives, bless their six-legged souls. Most times, when I'd work with the hives, I wouldn't get stung at all. But if I got stung, I got the shit stung out of me.

Because when they sting something big like a person or a bear or whatever, and lose that stinger and die, they send out an electrical signal, a sort of 'Aaarrgh' in bee-speak that tells the others to pitch in, it's a big mo-fo this time.

One time, the first sting was through my jeans, right on the knee where they were stretched tight from me squatting to lift a super. That hurt, and almost made me drop 50 lbs of bee hive, honey, bees and all. But after that first sting, I got six or seven more. Then there was the time I was wearing pants that were too lose around my boots, and didn't think to tape my ankles. I think I got close to a dozen stings on my calves that day.

But out in the open, when they're foraging for food, they'll do almost anything but sting you.

And in any case, this is all beside the point. Bees are important. Way important. Do you like almonds? The difference between an almond grove with bees and an almond grove with none is you get almonds if there are bees. Seriously, no bees means a 99% drop in that one crop. Then there's citrus, apples, various melons and berries. We need these bugs for all this stuff.

And wild bees do not exist anymore. They haven't for decades. Varroa mites, tracheal mites, American and European foulbrood (a bacterial infection of hives), have all taken their toll. Basically, without people to medicate them, bees can't survive anymore. At all.

When beekeepers get a call from someone claiming to have an infestation, they used to get excited and go thinking maybe they'd found a varroa resistant strain. Now they don't give a damn about such calls because it's never varroa resistant bees, it's always yellow jackets or some other wasp.

So now we have the beekeepers who are willing to suffer the bad backs and low honey prices and all the other hassle that keeping bees means, and they're losing 90% of their colonies and no one knows why.

My money is on the neonicitinoids. These are the new generation of pesticides, and they work by jacking with bugs' neurological workings. Bees have to be able to communicate the location of food to their colonies, and they ave to be able to navigate home. They are stunningly precise in this, and it wouldn't take much neuro-scrambling to fuck them up.

DDT almost wiped out bald eagles and a lot of other species. Thing that worries me is bees aren't as easy for people to get psyched up about saving, even though in many ways they are more important to our day to day lives. I'm not a big environmentalist, but with as many people as we have on this planet, a little stupid goes a long ways. And while we were able to save the whales to a great extent, nobody seems to much care that sharks are being decimated in an utterly inhuman and wasteful way for a stupid bowl of soup. And those sharks, like the bees, are major league important.

I know, my environmentalist friends will chide me that I don't take Al Gore to heart, yet here I am tilting at windmills to save my beloved bees. As far as the Goracle is concerned, I'm still skeptical. I've read his book, I've seen his movie, and he's not devoid of valid points. The book is pretty awful, but the movie is skillfully done.

But I heard a bit on NPR last time he went to Congress to testify. Then they ran a bit on what a shrewd businessman he is for investing in all these 'reduced carbon' technologies.

This is, politically, like Pete Rose not only betting on baseball, but betting on a Reds game and then trying to cheat in the game. Gore doesn't just want us to clean up our act, he wants the government to mandate the adoption of specific technologies that can't presently compete. Ones that, if a law forces their use, will make him richer and more powerful than he already is. Conflict of interest much?

Okay, now I've totally alienated anyone who I could have convinced to care about the bees. My work here is complete, just don't come crying to me when almonds are $18 a pound if you can find them.