If you see any of these little things humming around, tell them how very very very very very grateful you are, and that you want them to come back!
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About Me
- Roger Gathmann
- I am a translator, editor and commentator - and I've written two novels.
Two things, Roger. First, I need you to confess that you're not a liberal. Think of my poor head going "kaboom" every time I compare you to Kinsely, Yglesias and Berman. Second, the bees will be okay if people stop breeding them into vulnerable, steroidally pumped mini-monstrosities.
ReplyDeletehow does that joke go? Doctor, my head goes "kaboom" every time I compare Roger to Kinsely, Yglesias and Berman...
ReplyDeleteCome Back, Little Bees!
Mr. Scruggs, you think it is our genetic finagling. North thinks it is telephones. Myself, I think there are three factors:
ReplyDelete1. they are feeding these poor bees corn syrup derived from genetically engineered corn. Bees don't like corn syrup. It is like raising imprisoned humans on cod liver oil. Plus the genetic alteration might do some nasty things to their immune systems.
2. The bees are tired.
3. Gaia is pissed off.
The 3rd point was made by Dr. J. Morrison in 1968 at a famous conference in which he said:
what have we done to the earth/what have we done to our fair sister/ravaged and raped her and plundered and bit her/stuck her with knives in the sight of the dawn.
Obviously, Dr. Morrison was making a qualitative judgment which, at the time, he and his assistants did not have the quantitative data to back up. But LI thinks that now, with elephants turning homicidal world wide and bees in a rapture, and Antartica shrinking much more than they say in the papers (
this is a picture of what is left of Antarctica ), it is obvious that Gaia has had enough of this species. This will all be explained in my paper this summer at the James Morrison Institute for Ectoplamic Pataphysics.
So, you admit it then? You're a pataphysicist, not a "liberal". That helps a great deal, Roger. Actually existing liberalism makes Gaia weep and then shrug her shoulders very hard.
ReplyDeleteIt's not me alone who thinks the bees have been bred into helplessness. It's the bee keepers too. This is the third article I've posted that says the corporate bees, if you will, have been bred too large to access the flowers that provide them with immunities. Cretin capitalists make money off catastrophe, mainly by driving every honest person out of business and then screaming for a bailout. From bees to banks, same deal.
who ARE Kinsely, Yglesias and Berman exactly? bees wanna know! i hear they're looking for a good workman's comp lawyer.
ReplyDeletethis is a picture of what is left of Antarctica
ReplyDeleterotfp
They're court intellectuals. Not an honest ambulance chaser amongst them. Berman gained his reputation by proving that the sixties and seventies never existed, temporally or othwerwise. We went straight from Eisenhower to Reagan. Yglesias is a pierogie-fed version of an analytic philosphy-spoutin' Robert McNamara. Kinsley was a liberal, about eight hundred years ago, but his brain was sucked out by a giant sea slug while he was writing up Drake's voyages.
ReplyDeleteI'll ask my friend Eric if he can do anything for the bees. He's a teacher now, not a litigator anymore, but he's keen.
This is from a recent Bioscience article about colony collapse disorder:
ReplyDelete"... Cox-Foster and her colleagues realized that there were a lot more beekeepers whose hives were suffering. What beekeepers are reporting differs from standard die-offs caused by mites, Calderone explains. "When the bees get mites, they're often gone… [but] even if the bees are gone, you tend to find the brood and it tends to be deteriorated." Now, he says, "they're finding colonies with no bees; they're finding brood but it looks fairly healthy." Cox-Foster adds that with varroa mite infection, dead adult bees will be found in the colony. Furthermore, wax moths and small hive beetles will go into the dead colony, and bees from neighboring colonies will enter and maraud, stealing honey and comb. But in the current situation, no dead adult bees are found in or around the colony; the brood appears to be in good health, albeit untended by adults; and no marauders are going into the hives. This phenomenon has been termed "colony collapse disorder" (CCD).
Jerry Bromenshenk, of the University of Montana-Missoula, is studying the epidemiology of CCD. He notes that to date, about 20 to 30 percent of beekeepers' colonies have been affected, with losses ranging from 40 to 100 percent of hives. To a beekeeper with thousands of colonies, that is a huge economic hit-perhaps more than $1 million--and it is a loss of millions of bees.
Cox-Foster elucidates the three main hypotheses on what is killing the bees: CCD may be caused by one or more emerging pathogens; an environmental chemical or toxin may play a role in development of CCD; or general stresses associated with apicultural practices may be weakening the bees, leaving them open to infection. May Berenbaum, an entomologist from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, explains that, at present, there is no reason to reject any hypotheses, and she jokingly notes that even alien abduction of bees has been suggested."
It is the fact that the hives become no-go zones that tips us off that something is happening here that is spoooooooooky. Where are your usual parasites? Ladybug ladybug fly away home, it turns out, is a prophetic utterance, mangled somehow by its transmitters - for it is about honeybees. The children are alone. The vanishing proceeds apace. They are importing hives from Australia - and pretending life is fine. But honeybees, it is now being discretely said, are responsible directly or indirectly for about a third of the fruit and vegetable foodstuffs sold in this here country.
Gaia is pissed.
boy that sounds spooky!
ReplyDelete