The Bees!

The good news is that we can keep using our cell phones. Scientists announced yesterday that cell phones are probably not the cause of honey bees’ mass die-off. Wait, I asked myself, “Honey bees are dying off?” Applying the combined force of a Google/Wikipedia search, I discovered, that yes, honey bees are abandoning their colonies all over North America. Bee farmers, who of course, need bees, aren’t happy about this. The worst part? Up until a few days ago the primary culprit was cell phones.

I certainly thought it was reasonable. People can hardly walk and talk on a cell phone. I figured the bees were probably talking on their phones, flying off-course, and never finding their way back.

Truthfully, the article explained that bees communicate on the same frequency that cell phones use, so your hour-long talks with those significant others jam their signals guiding them back to the hive. This would not be the first case of signal jamming in history. It wouldn’t even be the most recent. Just last year the Air Force announced that the B-52 bomber radar shares a frequency with satellite television. In the ensuing legal battles, the Air Force was ordered off the frequency. Go figure, television is more important than national defense. I digress... Anyways, the bee-cell phone theory would be great if it weren’t for a) bees having been dying off since the 1980’s and b) there is no widely accepted scientific evidence for the theory.

Fortunately, scientists have a new culprit that would end in a choice between cell phones and honey (although today most honey is synthetic). Apparently, a virus called the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) is causing the mass abandonment of colonies in the United States. Thank you Israel for repaying 50 years of loyal support and billions in military aid by killing our bees. Reading on, I found that the virus isn’t even from Israel (I apologize to the Israelis for the last sentence) but instead from Australia. Yes, it might kill a scientist to name something in a fashion that makes sense. Nevertheless, the United States imports honey bees from Australia, which apparently has doomed our domestic bees. Talk about a need for immigration reform. Maybe if we built a wall across the Pacific and have Homeland Security to track bee trafficking…

IAPV has affected between 50% and 90% of commercial colonies in the last three years. Having not taken Discrete and Combinatorial Algebra 1, I can’t prove that that is an absurd amount of variability, but it seems that more research needs to be done. Furthermore, I can think of two clear solutions not in the article, even though my degrees here at Rose make my opinion on the subject worth about as much as Maple.

We could always replace the bees here domestically with Australian honey bees who apparently don’t suffer from IAPV. Of course, that could have the same drastic result as introducing rabbits to Australia (or Iceland), honey suckle to North America, and politicians to Washington D.C. The other solution would be to vaccinate every single bee in North America. It would be entertaining payback for those bee stings accumulated by humanity over the centuries, disregarding, of course, the whole ‘saving their species’ and ‘honey bees don’t sting arguments.’

Either way, the bees need our help; so, to all you biomedical and chemistry majors out there, get on it. You could even get t-shirts that said, “I saved the honey bees and all I got was this t-shirt (and the survival of modern agriculture).” Besides it would be more interesting than homework. To all you civil engineers, please don’t build any roads over their colonies; they’re already stressed and you, as Rose students, should know how that feels. Besides, if bees die off, Rose students couldn’t be “busy as bees”. Okay that was a stretch. Now that my cell phone is no longer a threat to a species survival, I’ve got a call to answer.