One flew in my dining room while I was working yesterday and promptly denied. IME, wtf.
died? You'd really have to live among them to know she denied.
Maybe the bee denied global warming. Or denied Christ and was punished by God!
Thinking about the collapse of the bee population makes me hella sad. I'm with this guy -- early morning drinking and haircuts to save the bees!
"Bzzzz .. ceci n'est pas un abeille ... bzzz ...."
I think he means the bee was deeee-nied, as in Armsmasher went all Dikembe Mutombo and slapped it out of the air and into the stands before it could reach its goal.
Somethng about the story doesn't seem like a big deal to me, either. Maybe I'm sensitive to it being oversold (all bee-pollinated plants will go extinct! Honey will be a thing of the past! Aaargh!).
I had already noticed the tendency to blame everything that we think -should be- causing some sort of environmental problems. Cell phones! GM food! Pesticides! Factory farming! Something!
Go ahead, cell phone callers. Murder the bees. You'll be sorry some day.
This is interesting -- I had read that the abandoned hives still had honey and larvae in them but were totally devoid of adult bees. What I hadn't read is that other nearby hives do not enter the abandoned hives to take the honey (bees are very aggressive at gathering honey, usually -- beekeepers clean off their honey-extracting centrifuges by leaving them open next to the hige, they're picked clean within hours).
Gotta be a pest or something.
7 - But that's because many alarmists and environmentalists are superannuated Boomers or irritating hippies; it has nothing to do with how worried one should be about the fact that roughly a quarter of the inventory of professional beekeepers seems to have died off. That strikes me as worrisome in a couple of different ways, even if a parade of idiot radio callers -- in Northern California, who'd've thunk it? -- think it's the fault of depleted uranium in Iraq or people not hugging bees enough.
7: Something doesn't have to be the end of civilization to be an interesting and important story. Honestly, smaller disruptions like this are more important to monitor and manage than big, obviously scary things like terrorism. Honestly, you and I are far more likely to be affected by disruptions in the food economy than be victims of terrorism.
I was out on a tour of local farms over the weekend, and someone asked a beekeeper about this. He's had it happen to two of his hives. He said it was eery to find a previously bustling hive almost empty but untouched - the bermuda triangle of beekeeping, he called it.
He said once he pulled the hive apart and aired it out, the other hives around it did their usual thing and stripped it of honey.
10: I was just being hyperbolic about the Iraq war stuff. The callers' questions were actually quite intelligent -- most of the causes they proposed were considerably more plausible than this cell phone nonsense. Well, alright, there was one lady who called to ask who she should call to have some bees removed from her property. But otherwise they were intelligent questions.
I agree that this is interesting, but the alarmism surrounding it seems misplaced given that an at least very similar phenomenon has occurred before. Still, it may be worth some action. Perhaps we could organize an SMS campaign to raise money for the bees.
One of the things I love about the internet: you can title an article "enough with the fucking bees."
Actually I think there is not much evidence that the bees -have- died off -- that's one of the reasons the disorder has proven hard to diagnose. The colonies simply abandon the hive -- if they do die, they die far enough away from the hive that you can't trace them back to it.
Bees will not go extinct, and honey will not stop flowing. It may get more expensive. Or this new disorder may be figured out and inexpensively solved.
A lot of species have been driven to extinction through neglect and selfishness, but bees are not going to be one of these species. They are too useful to humans, they work too hard. (Now maybe if those lazy polar bears would start pulling their weight, we'd solve their problem too...)
Don't we have high fructose corn syrup now? Honey is obsolete. Let the bees die.
I would so love for cafés to start offering a dish of high fructose corn syrup with which to sweeten your tea, and slather your muffin.
13 & 15 - I suspect you're right that the bees will be fine in the long term, but:
* The amphibian die-off has me antsy about sudden upswings in infectious animal badness.
* As far as I know, the decline in the wild bee population has already taxed apiarists to the limit, so I expect this is going to have irritating results in terms of my ability to eat the fuck out of some cherries over the next few summers, even if it doesn't have dramatic effects on the food chain as a whole. (Given that the ethanol-related inflation in corn prices has Coke considering switching back off of HFCS, I'm not sure how severe supply constraints would need to be to start impacting my ability to gorge myself on a whim.)
* Who doesn't love bees? They provide delicious honey and can be shot out of the mouths of robot dogs to sting your foes.
Neil's right, they're disappearing, not dying. I suspect they're in hiding, massing their forces and plotting, and when they show up again there's going to be all hell to pay.
irritating results in terms of my ability to eat the fuck out of some cherries over the next few summers
Was Zachary Taylor the president who died from this? I believe he's still available as a confessional persona.
Gromit could take your robot dog.
15: How many miles does a white bear get per seal (or Inuit)?
It's not just cherries we need to worry about, right? Most commercial fruits and veggies depend on bees for pollination.
We can just shrink Mexicans down with a Shrink-O-Ray and give them little jet packs and send them from flower to flower, right? I mean, this isn't a real problem, is it?
I dunno. I artificially inseminate my pumpkins with Q-tips in the late summer because insects don't seem to do the job very well.
That's a fun sentence to take out of context, isn't it?
25: Ben, if you have shrink-o-ray and a jetpack, I would love the job of pollinating flowers. That sounds like real fun.
The squirrels in my ceiling are building a human-scale, squirrel-piloted mechanical squirrel out of bees.
What a relief it'll be when it finally comes for me, to no longer wait in awful anticipation.
There is a nasty colony of bees living in the rafters of my barn. I sure wish they would up and disappear. Maybe I need to make more cell phone calls in their proximity.
Standpipe is arthegall, and 31 is a transparent ruse.
23: Fewer than we used to, alas. Many of us are being obsolesced by the hybrid white bear, in high demand among celebrity Berserkers.
Maybe is was LSD that caused all the bees to jump off the balcony en masse.
It's bad news when anything disappears from an ecosystem, because more imbalances soon follow. In our affluent society this bee problem is predominantly a risk to certain parts of the economy, rather than to an ecosystem; it should be less worrisome on a grand scale than the disappearance of oysters from the Chesapeake Bay which has led to eutrophication and red tides and the further disappearance of large fish. (note: I'm not sure of the details, but everyone should read the scary LA Times series about the messed-up oceans).
Notwithstanding the fact that bees are among the most common pollinators, are the risk to agriculture can have far-reaching consequences.
Trolling again, Lur?
Who is Tom?
Well, I've read about the bee problem before and it seems that it should be taken seriously. Tom seems to be an idiot who's annoyed by other people who might also be idiots, but he doesn't seem to have a clue about bees. I knew a moderate amount about the situation before, and he didn't add anything.
I have the feeling I missed something. Is the whole article a palindrome or an acrostic or something? Why did I read it?
If you re-arrange all the letters, and then take out a few, it spells "Ogged is gay"
23: Recently I had cause to wonder whether squirrel-chasing was calorically worthwhile for bears. It turns out that, very roughly, a chase of about 10 minutes is the break-even point at which the squirrel offers the same amount of calories as are expended in the chase. A seal or an Inuit offers somewhere on the order of 100 times the caloric content of a squirrel. The rest is left as an exercise.
Recently I had cause to wonder whether squirrel-chasing was calorically worthwhile for bears.
Mr. Lovecraft lives an unusual life.
39: You need to take the medication this facility prescribes for you, Mr. Emerson. Also, we're all a bit concerned about the effect you're having on that young Asian fellow you've been hanging out with.
Your comments about my idiocy may have some merit, but I have yet to hear anything that indicates the decline in bees is somehow new or more dire than it has been in the past. The entomologists seemed a little concerned, but much less so than the average internet user has been. And anytime someone begins to blame a mysterious biological ill on electromagnetic radiation, there's a very good chance that it's actually a heap of unscientific horseshit.
One other thing I didn't mention from the NPR show: apparently being an apiarist is a tough, unrewarding job. You travel the country with a truckload of bees making very little money. If this problem becomes serious enough to affect things other than hack journalists and their hysterical readers, we will presumably start to devote more financial resources toward bee maintenance -- paying apiarists better so that they can provide their bees with clean food, nests shielded from EM radiation, and nightly coat-brushings as they're gently sung to sleep. I have a hard time believing that a concerted effort along these lines wouldn't be able to save enough bees to allow our civilization to continue to squeak by.
Would we be in trouble if all the bees packed up and returned to their home planet tomorrow? Yes. But there's no indication that that's about to happen, and instead every reason to believe that this is a periodic fluctuation in the bee population that happens from time to time. I hate to sound like a global warming denier, but the level of bee panic really is a little bit out of control.
Tom, there was no information whatsoever in your piece. I really had a problem understanding why it was posted. Usually Ogged posts funny stuff, interesting stuff, or laughably stupid stuff. Your thing didn't make the cut for any of the three, though it was closest to the third.
The average internet user isn't very concerned about bees, and the frequent loonies are mostly loony about other things -- you're getting a sampling error I find especially worrisome (is your sample made up of ex-wives and ex-girlfriends?). The people I've run into who worry about the bees are well-informed environmental buffs who are quite reasonably asking whether this is something serious. The printed sources are in respectable places, including Science The Science piece is neither alarmist not reassuring.
Throw me a rose. Today must be my Bizet day.
John, you old coot, first, Tom is something of a regular, and friends with a bunch of other regulars here and second, the information in his piece was that several experts seem less concerned that recent articles would make us think we should be.
Well, I'll leave a discussion of Unfogged's editorial policy to Ogged. It's not as if I pitched the link to him or asked you to read it. It's too bad that you were in the mood for a more substantive post when you stumbled across mine, but I'm not prepared to take on responsibility for making the universe optimally Emercentric.
I'll admit that I'm no bee expert, but the folks I was citing seemed considerably better-versed on the matter than the average TreeHugger reader. If you didn't care for my account of the public radio program in question, I've managed to track down the original. Have a listen and bask in the overwhelming substance of it all.
As for this:
The average internet user isn't very concerned about bees
"The average internet user" is hardly anything at all. Still, the bees have gotten a lot of traction. The cell phone/bees story in the Independent has 1,254 links to it according to Technorati (when searching for the specific URL). The issue has also been covered by the Washington Post, CNN, the BBC, the NY Times (twice) and, perhaps most prestigiously, made the front page of Slashdot. Citations at Wikipedia.
All of this despite the fact that, according to Dr. Bromenshenk (on the program I linked to), a phenomenon occurred in the 60s that was so similar that "you could change the dates on the reports" and they'd be interchangeable.
"apparently being an apiarist is a tough, unrewarding job. You travel the country with a truckload of bees making very little money."
Yes, but something about the open road, the smell of flowers, the company of rough bees doing real bees' work... somehow it's worth it.
I'm not prepared to take on responsibility for making the universe optimally Emercentric.
Freeloader.
apparently being an apiarist is a tough, unrewarding job.
For some reason I first read "apiarist" as "aperapist". Which probably wouldn't falsify the sentence.
Aperapist? Google tells me nothing.
Some sort of rhetorical technique?
52: Maybe, depending on the point you're trying to make.
"Ape rapist", Ned.
I read "aperapist" as "arepist", which probably would continue not to falsify the sentence.
53: Just put on a gorilla suit and hang around in public and you'll figure it out.
Ned, it's derived from ape-rapist. It's become a common-enough profession that it's now customary usage to drop the hyphen.
52: ApeRapist. It's a body spray, like AXE.
Oh!
Once you read something a certain way, that tends to be the way you read it. Pronouncing it with the emphasis on "per" reminded me of words like "aposiopesis" and "ecphrasis".
I'm surprised google didn't come back with "Did you mean 'ape rapist'?"
Using the rhetorical technique of aperape (pronounced like apocope), I will now imply my own hirsuteness by juxtaposing it with that of others.
"Feelin' hairy?"
"Next to me, Dom DeLuise is a Ken doll, baby!"
"Excellent use of aperape!"
I think Russell Edson has prior claim on aperape.
Just put on a gorilla suit and hang around in public and you'll figure it out.
So people who dress in gorilla suits are asking for it? Is that what you're saying?
63: I had never heard of Russel Edson before, and I'm not sure I'm glad that I have now.
65: However creepy that poem makes him look, rest assured he has a dozen more that make him look much, much worse.
A man had just delivered a toad from his wife's armpit. He
held it by its legs and spanked it.
Do you love it? said his wife.
It's our child, isn't it?
Does that mean you can't love it? she said.
It's hard enough to love a toad, but when it turns out to be
your own son then revulsion is without any tender inhibition,
he said.
Do you mean you would not like to call it George Jr.?
she said.
But we've already called the other toad that, he said.
Well, perhaps we could call the other one George Sr.,
she said.
But I am George Sr., he said.
Well, perhaps if you hid in the attic, so that no one needed
to call you anything, there would be no difficulty in calling
both of them George, she said.
Yes, if no one talks to me, then what need have I for a name?
he said.
No, no one will talk to you for the rest of your life. And
when we bury you we shall put Father of Toads on your
tombstone.
Talk to him? No. But the father of the toads seems to need servicing.
42: "Recently I had cause to wonder whether squirrel-chasing was calorically worthwhile for bears."
Mr. Lovecraft lives an unusual life.
Not really - "cause to wonder" is much different from "need to know".
54: Apparently, ape rapists make computer hardware run faster.
"You'd say, I'm sorry, I can't come out, Rape an Ape is on."
The exercise might be good for the bear.
Bears are omnivores, and I reami mean omni. Grubs, carrion, menstruating women, anything.
I reami mean omni
This sounds like a magical incantation.
I reami mean omni, I reami mean omni, I reami mean omni, *bloot*
Oh, gross.
Oh, of course it was Forum, which seems to draw every lefty nutbar north of San Luis Obispo to their phone between 9 and 11 every weekday morning. And, of course, it's now on satellite radio, too, so that the rest of the country can get up close and personal with every last one of our 27%. Bah.
79 pwned by 71, I think.
Another Time Trumpet classic: Green-screening East Enders.
arepist
A manufacturer of arepas?
79 pwned by 71, I think.
Scratch that, reverse it.
Hey on the general topic of environmental alarmism, have you guys considered the threat posed by daylight savings time?
I'm surprised she didn't use the phrase "God's time" to describe the alternative. Also, DST sucks.
It's a "he" -- the consensus view seems to be that the letter is a successful jape.
Serves me right for not reading the comments.
The cardinal sin of blog perusal. (At least for a couple of blogs including Unfogged and Making Light.)
Hey Ben, if you ever make it out NYC-a-ways again, we should make a pilgrimage to the arepist of Jackson Heights.
Wow!! She even has a MySpace page now! The information on it is not all factually correct but.
Ugh. Did anybody see what Alth/ouse wrote about the bees? Yet another reason not to overhype these potential environmental problems.
You mean that it is "more ominous than global warming"?
Yes. How could five off-the-cuff words be so annoying?
The link in 44 is mildly interesting, but it's worth noting that it's not a peer-reviewed article in Science. It's under the rubric of 'Random Effects,' which means that it's one of the news-ey pieces written by the Science staff to pad each issue.
Which doesn't make it wrong or uninteresting, but it's just something to keep in mind: it's written by a journalist with some general background in science, not by a scientist per se. They're working from interviews with scientists, with press-releases from scientific or academic institutes, and from (in some cases) the original research. But it's not original research itself and it's not reviewed by other scientists necessarily. (The same caveat applies to the Supplemental Information section of any paper, too, which is where a lot of useful information is often buried.)
I was mostly just trying to show that the honeybee problem isn't just something silly that New Age housewives fret about.
Fair enough. Your point wasn't obnoxious, but you said it in a profoundly obnoxious way.
FWIW, I didn't read the Random Effects blurb as saying anything incompatible with what tom wrote in the first place, either. But I guess he's posted a link to the original audio that he was talking about? So you can have a listen for yourself.
Just, for the love of God, stop before they get to the call-in portion of the show. I haven't heard this particular episode, but trust me, you'll thank me later.
I thought his post was obnoxious and contentless. I was exactly like all the other "Ha ha look at the silly bimbo environmentalists" posts I've ever read. At this point think that the significance of the problem is an open question. A lot depends on the credbility of the individuals on the radio, about which I know nothing. (PBS puts a lot of shit up, eg Richard Perle recently, unrebutted.)
You're kinda cranky sometimes, Emerson.
He is a cranquistador.
Teens Apologize for "All Those Missing Bees"
