While we contemplate our Iraqi navel: where are the bees?

One possible solution to global warming, viewed on a more cosmic scale and less anthropocentrically, is the massive die-off of the human race. Honeybees are currently demonstrating how this is done. About 70% of the bees have disappeared from their hives on the East Coast and about 60% on the West Coast. It is a global phenomenon, especially in advanced technological countries. Three-fourths of all the world's flowering plants and trees depend upon the honeybee for pollination. Among those who appreciated the hard and necessary work that bees do was Albert Einstein, who had this to say about them:

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

So here's the current deal: the bee is disappearing off the surface of the globe. The upside of this apian phenomenon is that it solves such long-term problems as the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, the national debt and whether you've got enough in your 401(k). The key question, in another year or two, might be whether you've got too much money to get rid of in the four years we all have left. To be very clear, there is absolutely no substitute for the honeybee. None whatsoever. This is not one of those situations where you convert your internal combustion engine from gasoline to ethanol. Bees own the patent for plant pollination as surely as Monsanto owns the genetic composition of most of agricultural nature.

No one is sure why it's happening, but we can reliably suspect we've got something to do with it. Whenever something delicate, natural, and essential gets completely fucked up, the usual culprit is homo sapiens and his endless, stupid-ass tinkering with ecological cycles and balances. By now you'd think we would have learned the perilous lessons of unintended consequences. We barge into some enormously complicated latticework of natural interrelationships, dangerously armed with our half-wit ideas and cocky arrogance about how it all works, and completely screw it up. No matter how many times we do it, we remain convinced we're on top of the situation.

Maybe the bees can't find the hives because their intricate navigation systems are messed up by all the proliferating radiation from all the damn cell phones we're all addicted to (one theory). Maybe it's a resurgence of mite infestation secondary to global warming (another theory). Maybe it has something to do with genetically engineering plants to withstand herbicides that used to kill weeds until the weeds genetically modified themselves (using a controversial theory called "Evolution") to thrive alongside the GM plants owned, created and trademarked by Monsanto (yet another theory). Maybe the bees said, fuck these guys, let's die off for now and get rid of these assholes (my theory).

So having maybe five or six years left might seems like a big deal, except don't forget the critical importance of the fate of one Arab country where a bunch of religious zealots are hunkered down in a four mile square bunker working on ways to kill us while they spend our money. The 100% die-off thing, hey: these things happen. But Iraq...