Fun Story About How All The Bees Are Dying And We're Fucked

Pleasant evening reading, a couple months old, but the first I've seen of it.

A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination.

Researchers are scrambling to find the cause of the ailment, called Colony Collapse Disorder.

Reports of unusual colony deaths have come from at least 22 states. Some affected commercial beekeepers - who often keep thousands of colonies - have reported losing more than 50 percent of their bees. A colony can have roughly 20,000 bees in the winter, and up to 60,000 in the summer.

"We have seen a lot of things happen in 40 years, but this is the epitome of it all," Dave Hackenberg, of Lewisburg-based Hackenberg Apiaries, said by phone from Fort Meade, Fla., where he was working with his bees.

As much as we humans think we lord dominion over all of Earth's living creatures, actually no, we're as dependent on nature's ecosystem as all the rest. And if all the bees die, we lose three-quarters of all flowering plants. The reason for this mass death of the bee population is as yet unknown. There's more discussion here.

Environmentalists aren't seen so much as wackos anymore, but that's due mainly to the issue of climate change. There are dozens of other ways in which our presence on this planet, and more important, what we have decided to do to it, has had an extremely negative impact. We pollute rivers and oceans and send billows of smoke into the air and drill every last morsel of petroleum out of the ground, and we stumble around thinking that we're übermensches and that none of this will ever come back to bite us in the ass.

Wrong again, Ronald. And while technology is on our side, the willingness of man to refuse to hold himself responsible for his actions is not.

(h/t Brendan)