Cursed Tongue: Missing the Buzz

Posted by CursedTongue on April 5, 2007

In October of 2006, beekeepers in the U.S. began reporting the mysterious disappearance of entire colonies under their care. Puzzled keepers weren’t even finding dead bees. About 90% of commercial bee colonies in the U.S. have vanished in the past six months. Now European bees are going missing, without so much as a single ransom note.

I know the situation is serious because there are already two acronyms for the phenomenon. Vanishing Bee Syndrome (VBS), and Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). But why then, are there only a handful of small news outlets picking this story up? Perhaps it is because the American news reporters feel chastened by the recent news that accused Duke Lacrosse team members were not the brutal rapists the media made them out to be. And maybe e-mails concerning alleged politically motivated firings in the Justice Department really were deleted accidentally.

Missing bees lack the glamour of missing blond rich girls. But what the American media doesn’t realize is that they’re overlooking an opportunity to hang the sandwich board that screams, “Oh my God! We’re all going to die!” on their respectable news anchors.

According to scientific T-shirt icon, Albert Einstein, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years left to live. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” An explanation so simple, even a Creationist could understand it.

CCD may even be caused by a common household device, which could be in your possession at this very moment (News at 10). A recent German study proves that cell phones disorient bees. Beekeepers are not surprised by the findings, as they do not house their bees under power lines, which also disrupt the bee’s ability to navigate. I would have thought the news media would be on this new menace created by cell phones like fear mongers on genetically altered rice.

Although cell phones existed prior to the early 80’s, they really weren’t in wide use until much later, because users had to take up weightlifting if they wanted to have lengthy conversations. And the bee population began to decline in the early 70’s. Urbanization leading to less farming in general, verroa mites (a bloodsucking bee parasite), pesticides and lack of a good publicist are among the factors contributing to the decrease in the number of bee colonies in the U.S. over the last 4 decades.

Complicating matters is interbreeding with African bees. So-called “killer” or Africanized bees don’t put up with any guff from “the man.” Africanized bee colonies are too fierce to be rented out for crop pollination and too protective to then be robbed of their honey.

The nation’s food supply is at risk. More than one third of the food supply in the U.S. relies on pollination by bees. Sure, obese Americans might lose weight if they ate 1/3 less food, but I’m assuming that McGriddles and Oreo Cookies won’t be affected as much as fresh produce.

In the face of such a disaster, it seems the news media in the U.S. is suffering from its own acronym, LCD, or Lost Credibility Disorder. The U.S. news has become a bizarro upside-down world where the teasers are longer than the actual news stories. Where the sensational but inconsequential is reported incessantly. LCD is a disease of malnourished journalist brains, fed on a poor diet of stories about the latest thing that will kill viewers, American Idol and the minutia of celebrity lives. The blaring, heart-pounding music, the flashy graphics and ad nauseam uninformed speculation on breaking news events, compound the harmful effects of leaving no condiment from Anna Nicole Smith’s refrigerator unmentioned.

If you don’t believe that American TV reporters are suffering from depleted synaptic resources, flip through the news channels during the next hurricane, and count the number of mentally challenged journalists risking life and limb for a live shot of a wind-blown, soggy idiot in a North Face jacket holding a microphone.

The good news is that we can cure the ails of the American news media and the bees in one fell swoop. First, we hire producers of news shows from England (a magical land, where the news is sedate and informative). Then we put the promotional skills of American news show producers to work advancing the cause of bees. Who better to promote bees than a group of people who want the public to think they will die if they don’t listen to the following “news” story?

We need merchandise. We need black and yellow striped ribbon car magnets. We need black and yellow band bracelets that say “Bee Strong.” We need an insectoid Al Sharpton.

We need a militant advocacy group to raise money to protect and foster American bees and beekeepers. The obvious course of action is to equip bees with GPS systems, and entice wayward bees back to farms with perks like full medical and optical (which is not going to be cheap what with the bee’s compound eyes).

Of course, bees may have merely returned to their own planet in a “So long, and thanks for all the pollen” scenario. In which case we’re screwed.

- Sarah Letnes

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