Does fate hinge on the lowly bee?

In yesterday’s New York Times there was an article about honeybees. It has preyed on my mind. Did you know massive numbers of honeybees have died off or disappeared?

What a disaster. How many plants are pollinated by bees? How much of civilization and our ability to feed ourselves is dependent on the activities of the lowly bee. Do we think of this? Not really I suspect. Bees are something we swat at when they disturb our picnic, or run from because we are allergic to the sting.

Spring is just starting; the bees aren’t really out here. But what would happen if there were no more bees? I read the stories, the theories, have the bees eaten something that has caused them to die off? This strikes me as interesting as I read about changing animal’s metabolisms or feeding them antibiotics en masse so that we can raise them on diets that their bodies weren’t built to handle just because it is convenient to big business. The diets of bees have changed. Beekeepers feed bees food based on the same processed corn that we subject ourselves too. Many natural foods have been so altered or eliminated by corporate agriculture that the bee’s normal food is not available. We are what we eat. What we eat may not only determine how we live, but how we die.

Or is it other things. Environmental changes? Corporate Farming? The arrogance of humanity?

Here we are trying to make ourselves more green, trying to save ourselves from the pending upheaval caused by global warming, and perhaps a greater damage has already been done without our even paying attention.

I have been thinking about Thomas Friedman’s article in the New York Times on April 15, which I am still pondering, and thinking about how I can be more environmentally conscious and take up a smaller footprint. I am thinking about what we eat and what goes into what we eat. I do not believe eating local will solve the world’s problems. I believe we need a global economy even for food, but there are many things that are done better on a local scale. I don’t believe people are going to stop using energy. I believe we need to find new ways to create it, ways less harmful to the earth. But if the bees die, will there be enough time. Or is our fate sealed.

In many ways, my generation and the one before me, the post-war generations have all been reared on experimental technologies, messing with food and chemicals as such a normal part of our lives we really have no idea if we are better off, or worse.

It may not matter. Like Goliath we may be heading for a fall from a source we never even considered worthy of thought.