Bees, The End of the World, Poets, etc.

So when I first heard that honeybees were disappearing en masse and this was going to further screw the planet it was at a poetry reading, in poem form, and I didn't become alarmed, because who trusts poets? Then today I stumbled across this post article, which is less lovely than the poem and precisely as informative. Some excerpts:

Now, around the world, honeybees are vanishing en masse, leaving their humans engaged in a furious attempt to figure out the meaning of their exodus. Entire colonies are following the Shakespearean stage direction, "Exeunt omnes." They're flying off and not returning. Commercial beekeepers open their hives and find them empty except for a queen, a few immature bees and abundant honey and pollen. The rest of the bees are simply gone, leaving behind not even dead bodies.

A third of our food supply -- including much of the boredom-relieving stuff, from cranberries to cucumbers -- is dependent on animal pollinators like the honeybee. As a result, this mystery is rapidly joining the all-star ranks of millennial end-time run-for-your-lives threats, right up there with Y2K, mad cow disease, West Nile virus, SARS and avian flu....

If what you're searching for is an entire spectrum of moral lessons regarding the evils of human behavior, this crisis is even better than global warming. If you hate globalization, then you will doubtless see its evils as patent in the disappearance of the bees. Pesticides? Genetically modified foods? Those, too, are convenient hypotheses in the absence of contradictory information. Even cellphones have been offered as an explanation. If you're driven crazy by them, then so must be the bees. Isn't it obvious?

I am tempted to make broad metaphors or speculate wildly, but all the people in the article who do so kind of look like jackasses. I do think it speaks to something f'ed up going on in the universe, both in terms of the potentially disastrous disruption of natural patterns, and in the sense that people are desperate to attach personally instructive psychological meaning to all such phenomena, which seems to indicate an absence of actual stuff that should be personally meaningful and psychologically instructive. Anyway. Bees. Food for thought. What are you people doing with your lives, assuming the world's not ending?