The bears and the bees

Question: Can you imagine this?

The time: The not too distant future.

The place: Forbes… Question: Can you imagine this?

The time: The not too distant future.

The place: Forbes Avenue.

You: Minding your own business, just walking, not particularly to anywhere, probably listening to NPR’s podcast on your iPod. And suddenly some unknown force, some feeling – perhaps the voice of Obi-Wan – moves you to glance up. And what do you see but a pack of 16 grizzly bears soft shoeing down Forbes Avenue, right toward you.

Of course, your first inclination is to run in the other direction. So you turn.

But wait. From the opposite direction comes a pack of 16 polar bears, snapping their fingers in a very “West Side Story”-esque fashion, prepared for a rumble. And they’re not feeling too pretty or giddy tonight.

Is this something out of your wildest dreams?

Perhaps. But it’s also the future. It’s the reality-to-be. You might ask, what on earth could possibly create such a situation?

A number of things, I say.

The first, and most obvious, is the blurring line between polar bear and grizzly bear territories.

It’s common knowledge that the melting of the ice caps has driven some polar bears south, but what many people don’t know is that as the Arctic is becoming more accessible, grizzly bears are moving north – into polar bear land. And, to make matters worse, grizzlies have been known to eat polar bear cubs.

I love polar bears, especially babies, so I find this to be pretty horrible. There is going to be a clash of cultures between the two bear groups, especially with the endangerment of the cubs. Normally I’m all for integration of cultures, but in matters of infanticide, well, it might be better to keep these bears apart.

Or at least try to maintain the environments that have sustained them since they walked across the Bering Strait wearing adorable Russian hand muffs.

Thing number two: Where have all the bees gone?

Bees all over the country have been mysteriously abandoning their hives and dying off with no certain explanation. It could be disease or pollution or pesticides. It could be pure disenchantment – we’ve all felt that need to cut and run before. But my smart friend Bryan (he goes to Carnegie Mellon) said that it might be the cell phones that are disrupting the bee behavior and causing this phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder.

Now, this bee thing is really important. Honeybees are responsible for pollinating about one-third of U.S. crops. They’re the predominant pollinator of the Californian almond crop.

And most importantly – especially to bears and cough drop fanatics – they’re responsible for honey. Bears love honey. Winnie-the-Pooh loves honey. Yogi Bear loves honey (all those pic-a-nic baskets were full of peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Probably). And there are a ton of funny videos of bears trying to knock down bee’s nests. So if bees are disappearing, and honey is disappearing, bears are going to feel the sting.

They might even go after the honey, searching out the bees and seeing where they’ve taken it. If I were a honey-searching bear, I’d travel as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as Forbes and Meyran avenues.

Pause for a moment: If anyone wants to e-mail me to complain that polar bears don’t eat honey, I am going to tell them right now: Go up to a polar bear, give him a stick covered in honey and see if he doesn’t like it. Once you’ve had that sweet nectar, you can’t go back.

All of these things – the collision of habitats, the potential disappearance of honey, the overall dwindling of bounteous food and shelter – are going to spark a mass exodus. Before we know it, grizzly bears and polar bears will be hitting the mainland United States, looking for more to eat and a better place to bed down. That little scenario we talked about earlier, with the two different bear gangs getting ready to throw down?

I know that Earth’s most vicious creatures warring in the urban streets sounds super awesome.

Therefore you might be inclined to try and speed up the process of causing such a episode by taking really long drives in your Hummer or chasing all the bees away by text messaging as much as humanly possible.

But keep this in mind: In our scenario, 32 bears are marching into battle, and you’re standing right in the middle of it.

Cassidy loves colons. E-mail her at cassidygruber@gmail.com. See you in two weeks!