The Vanishing and Mass Suicide

I watched a great BBC4 documentary recently about the fact that 1/3 of the UK's and US's bees have died.*

The Acting State Apiarist - (what a great job title) explained that they are calling this phenomenon Colony Collapse Disorder.

Am I bothered? I asked myself. I don't have a sweet tooth, so I don't like honey. What's the big deal?

The purple gardener in me should have known better. Bees are responsible for 80% of all pollination in the world.

In the world of flower sex - bees are the King Pimps in gold chains and Hummers. Without them, the planet's flora goes celibate, frustrated and ultimately barren.

Forget global warming. This is literally the end of the world, unless we all pitch in with Q Tips and endless patience, or stick velcro on the backs of wasps to catch pollen so that they can finally perform some useful function on the planet.

In the US, bees get shipped endlessly around the 50 states, purely to allow plants to procreate. The entire almond crop of California alone, which is a mindboggling 80% of the world's output requires 10 billion bees each year for 3 weeks to bear fruit, and almonds are the #1 horticultural export of the US, worth $2 billion annually. The Death of Bees is a seriously-serious economic problem.

I can sense that I still haven't entirely captured your interest yet. I don't like almonds either so it doesn't seem like a great loss. But here's the thing.

The bees are not just dying........

they're disappearing.

There are no bodies.

There is conjecture that it's a virus, or chemical poisoning from the years of ingesting pesticides and whatever else they spray crops with these days, but that does not explain the lack of corpses.

Beekeepers are checking their hives, only to find them suddenly empty, save for a few scattered bodies. And we're talking billions and billions of missing bees - worldwide. If I tell you that it takes 2,200 trucks to transport California's almond bees alone, you can get a sense of the scale. The landscape should be knee deep in stiffening workers and drones.

So theories:

Where are they all?

Have they gone into hiding, fed up of globe-trotting prostitution as a lifestyle?

Are they being stolen to some purpose? Are Evil Rabbits planning some elaborate world takeover?

Have the 456 swapped their drug of choice for getting high from children to honey?

Answers on a postcard please.

Things have taken an eerie turn on Friendly Drive as well. I came down the other morning to discover that the stick insects have committed suicide en masse. All inexplicably dead, in one go. No change of diet or environment or anything.

I can only assume that they've heard about the bees and chose death before privet deprivation.

*Clearly I have no life.