Irony At It’s Finest – Wonderful Reading Material For Killing Bees

Time Magazine released an article in their August 2013 edition.  The front cover said: A world without bees.  It had a picture of a honey bee and at the bottom of the front cover it said: The price we'll pay if we don't figure out what is killing the honey bee.  I might have figured it out.

A couple days ago I was sitting in my new apartment and I had my ceiling light on.  I saw a few shadows zooming around my living room and when I looked up I realized what it was.  It wasn't a honey bee, it was a yellow jacket which is a little bit bigger.  Pretty big bee.

The article in TIME was explaining how the honey bee population was starting to go down. 

You can thank the Apis mellifera, better known as the Western honeybee, for 1 in every 3 mouthfuls you'll eat today. Honeybees — which pollinate crops like apples, blueberries and cucumbers — are the "glue that holds our agricultural system together," as the journalist Hannah Nordhaus put it in her 2011 book The Beekeeper's Lament. But that glue is failing. Bee hives are dying off or disappearing thanks to a still-unsolved malady called colony collapse disorder (CCD), so much so that commercial beekeepers are being pushed out of the business.

Oh great... now I feel better. This thing is zooming around my living room so I grabbed the first magazine I could find, rolled it up and started swinging.  ( I have to admit, I Barry Bonded this thing across the room) Upon killing the bee I unraveled the magazine and realized... sure enough it was TIME's August "what's killing the bees" article.  I said to myself... "Well, I'd start with saying it's probably this magazine."

But back to the article.

So what's killing the honeybees? Pesticides (Magazines)— including a new class called neonicotinoids — seem to be harming bees even at what should be safe levels. Biological threats like the Varroa mite are killing off colonies directly and spreading deadly diseases. As our farms become monocultures of commodity crops like wheat and corn — plants that provide little pollen for foraging bees — honeybees are literally starving to death. If we don't do something, there may not be enough honeybees to meet the pollination demands for valuable crops. But more than that, in a world where up to 100,000 species go extinct each year, the vanishing honeybee could be the herald of a permanently diminished planet.

Sure I kind of feel bad about it, but I get a kick out of irony.