Bees

August 10, 2015

Greetings from the apiary,

It turns out I am a beekeeper.  Well, I don’t really ‘keep’ them, since they can leave anytime they want to.  I just happen to live in the same house they do.

Today I will make a confession, a digression and a prediction.  I mention this in case you needed something to look forward to.  And I like to set goals. 

Throughout my many decades of adulthood I have managed to avoid bees, and it appears they have had the same luck with me.  The few times we were forced in the same proximity I followed the Golden Bee Rule: Don’t bother them and they won’t bother you.  Sometimes referred to as the Golden Myth.

I will confess that on occasion I have had to resort to violence to protect myself or my family, wielding a magazine, shoe, tomahawk, whatever was handy to prevent panic.  I have dispatched more than a few bees to the afterlife. 

It would now appear that perhaps I have been guilty of my share of insecticide.  There evidently is a shortage of bees in our country and the consequences could be, well, consequential. 

When I was in high school I learned an important lesson about bees.  In my Creative Writing class I got a B on a paper because I wrote the phrase “…drawn to it like a bee after honey.”  My instructor wrote “Bees are not attracted to honey.  Bears are attracted to honey.”  Hence, the B.  Forty years later, I realize this was a compound lesson because of the important bonus info about the bears.  But I digress.

If you are driving while reading this you might want to pull over to get a pen and paper because I am going to cover a lot of very technical details you will want to be able to remember later.

People who grow certain stuff (farmers?) rely on bees to make the stuff grow.   A lot of fruits and vegetables are pollinated by bees which magically helps them become produce.  It is referred to as ‘pollimagic’, a term that is so new that Google won’t know it.  California almond growers, (farmers?) are in a tizzy because their crops (not sure here if almonds are a fruit or vegetable) are at risk of failing because of the previously noted bee shortage.

In fact, farmers are actually hiring bees to pollinate their crops. They hire huge bee-keeping companies to bring in truckloads of gigolo bees to do what bees do best. 

 The almond growers need 1.6 million bee colonies to pollimagically transmogrify their crop, and there is only a third of that number available, due in part to what has been called ‘colony collapse.’ 

Bees are failing for a variety of reasons including farm chemicals, lack of flowery habitats, and strangely enough, cell phone use.  Scientists have postulated that the EMF that cell phones emit is enough to confuse bees who then cannot find their way back to their hive.  This is why it is now illegal in California for bees to use cell phones while driving.

It turns out that the shortage has also led to ‘bee rustling’.  Some criminals are sneaking onto farms and stealing the bee colonies so they can rent them out to other farmers for (hold on to your hat Donald Trump) $200.00 a month.  Police have been trying to stop the thieves by setting up sting operations.

Last night I discovered that there is a cadre of bees making a home in the comfort of some hollow space in my house.  This is the kind of thing I would normally overlook (or avoid looking at) but last night, as I was eating on the deck, they were careening around like drunken sailors, buzzing into my salad, probably getting pollen all over my French fries.

So sometime in the near future I will likely be applying a humane method of extermination, since the bees have violated the aforementioned Golden Bee Rule. I will have to do this quickly.  For those of you keeping track, this was not the prediction.

This is the prediction: sometime soon, California will pass a law making it illegal to kill bees. And if history is any indicator of future events, which I am told by my financial planner it is not necessarily, then all other states will follow the example of the west coast.  We will still be able to have guns, but we won’t be able to use them on bees. 

For those of you who have carelessly been smashing bees with your cars, flattening them with flyswatters, fogging them, trapping them, or squishing them with heavy books, you might want to think about changing your ways.

And then there is this: I happen to enjoy honey on my cereal every morning, and I like to keep a large supply on hand in my pantry.  I have been told by someone more familiar with metaphors than entomology that bees are not attracted to honey, but that bears are.  And yet I have a nest of bees in my house, and no bears have been seen.  Hmm.  Perhaps my B was not meant to be?  Good question.

Hope this finds you buzzing,

David

Copyright © 2015 David Smith