Change yourself, leave bee colonies alone

In a world of advanced technology …

One planet will have to learn …

To survive …… In a world of advanced technology …

One planet will have to learn …

To survive …

Without bees …

This sounds like the narration for a movie trailer because the very idea conjures images of a horror film. However, if current trends continue, this may very well become a reality. A story from the Associated Press says that Maryland beekeepers lost 45 percent of their bees last year as a result of some unknown cause.

This trend is not exclusive to Maryland. Tens of thousands of bee colonies have died in at least 35 states. Scientists are left scratching their heads.

The problem is colony collapse disorder, and it is killing a quarter of our nation’s bees. The cause is unknown, but when it strikes, adult bees abandon their hives leaving only the brood and the queen.

Fearful citizens of the country have blamed this on everything from pesticides to terrorist plots.

At first I thought to myself, “I hate getting stung by bees. Good riddance.” However, bees are responsible for pollinating more than 90 flowering crops. Their disappearance is a tremendous threat to our food supply.

But what is the real cause? Is it humans using pesticides? Is it humans bringing on global climate change? Is it humans using cell phones?

Yes, some people believe that cell phone radiation is disrupting the navigation systems of honeybees and knocking them right out of the sky. Personally, I think it’s the fault of beekeepers – always keeping bees and never giving them.

I wasn’t really convinced by the cell phone explanation, so I went outside to investigate. After throwing rocks at a basketball-sized hive, I held up my phone as the bees approached. I think I saw one fall down, but it was hard to see with my eyes swelling up.

But this threat brings up many important questions. Do we spend too much time on our cell phones? Does texting have the same effect? Will the iPhone live up to all the hype?

It is interesting to wonder whether or not we would be able to cut back on phone use since our lives depended on it. We live in such excess that it is hard to see us ever cutting back. I mean, it took a feature-length movie to get McDonald’s to stop “super sizing.”

I spoke of this problem to my friend Harvey, but he did not seem worried. “If the bee thing becomes a problem, we’ll just breed more of them,” he said.

In recent times, it seems as though this has become the way to solve a problem. We don’t want to change, and so we attempt to change everything else. For as many as 40,000 years people have survived without cell phones, but I cannot count the number of times I have heard someone say, “I cannot live without my phone.”

Quite the contrary, my friend. You can’t live with your cell phone.

Imagine a world where bees are a commodity. Imagine your father in a beekeeper’s outfit in the backyard trying to make sure that your family gets enough apples for the winter.

Imagine if we had to breed bees in an unnatural way. It seems a little too much like a less-exciting version of “Jurassic Park.”

But don’t go throwing away your cell phone just yet. It turns out that the study done by German researchers that found the cell phone threat wasn’t actually a study on cell phones. In fact, the study done at Landau University had nothing to do with mobile phones at all.

Sorry, news networks. The flashy “Food Shortage Disaster” graphic will have to wait.

So go on and keep blabbing. But whatever the cause of dying bees, it is almost certainly our fault somehow. When a massive portion of the food supply depends upon the survival of bees, somehow I don’t think Mother Earth would decide to kill them off.

It is time that we start to think less about convenience and luxury and more about the well-being of our planet’s future. Because even though this one time a bee chased me from my house to my neighbor’s house and then stung me, I think I’d miss them if they were gone.

No matter how widely reported or serious of an issue this grows into, I can see 300 million Americans sitting at home watching television while talking on cell phones while eating disgusting food full of preservatives while poisoning the air with their low-efficiency vehicle running in the driveway.

I can see politicians dodging the issue. They’ll say things like, “This problem is of great importance, and I’ll do something about it. My opponent, on the other hand …”

This all seems a bit drastic, but even if the bees are not at risk, how much would it hurt, instead of changing everything else, to change ourselves?

E-mail Josh at jmg77@pitt.edu.