Plight of the Bumblebee

Have you ever considered the common bumblebee? I mean really considered it? No, neither have I. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been somewhat of a fan of the common humble bumbling bee. Since the age of three I’ve got a real thrill from throwing caution to the wind and dunking a teaspoon in a pot of honey and sucking up that sweet gooey golden nectar. Some people lose their sweet-tooth. Not me. Instead it has grown and matured with age, so now I do the same thing but with a ladle while sipping a fine mug of brandy. I couldn’t do that if I didn’t have the honey.

Bees are ten times better than cocking wasps, which do nothing with their lives apart from ruin picnics, kill my mates and make me run around flapping my arms like a spastic stuck in a particle accelerator. They’re too lazy even to make honey. All a wasp needs to do in order to feel it has lead a complete life is sting as many innocent people as possible. They probably fart anthrax, and enjoy it too the little shits.

Crap wasps are another reason I’ve always respected the bee too. It does not want to fight; its life is one of peace and serenity, creating sweet honey for the greater good. When it has to fight, it is as a last resort and it even offers up its own life to make up for the shame of inflicting pain on another creature. A noble sentiment I think we can all learn from. The bee is like a trained kung-fu* warrior who has spent years on top of a mountain meditating on life, and I think ‘Bumblebee’ is a much harder name than pussy-little ‘Grasshopper’ any day. The only time I’ve ever been stung by a bee was when I was five and throwing rocks at a nest in the garden. So I deserved that one.

But all is not rosy in the world of the bee my friends. I happened to be in the right time at the right place when listening to Radio 4 to hear about CCD, or Colony Collapse Disaster to those who aren’t down with the buzz on the street*. Apparently where there were once bees there now are not. But why should you care? You’re young, free and happy, why worry about a striped insect, right? Wrong.

Don’t feel bad, I thought the same, but that’s why the BBC had got two bee expert scientists in to talk about the problem*. It turns out that bees do more than most people give them credit for. Apparently, according to the beedophiles, something like 60% of the world’s food exists because of bees and two out of every three bites of food you take contain a bee-manufactured product*, which is a lot. It’s do with the amount they pollinate. No bees, no plants, no life on earth as we know it. I wish there was a way to make big scary music play the instant your eyes read that sentence but yet again this supposed technology just can’t keep up with one man’s dreams.

The thing that made me happy though was the calm and measured way these bee scientists answered questions about this CCD, both the causes of, and the solutions to it. They addressed the questions and answered them based on research they’d done. No scare mongering, no cries for attention, just laying out the facts and talking about how to deal with it.

In theory, all these bees disappearing is as big a problem as global warming. If not bigger. But no one really cares. Not actually. You’re not gonna get that Irish cunt dressed up in a novelty bee suit campaigning for everyone to save the bees, so it’s left to the experts to work out what the problem is in a calm and measured way and take steps to prevent it and the subsequent collapse of civilisation occurring, while everyone else is blissfully unaware. No idiots in t-shirts telling everyone else what to think with their uninformed opinions, no moronic concerts that kill more bees than they save and are just done for money*. God I wish this was how most problems were dealt with.

Can you imagine if the BBC got Madonna in to talk about the CCD problem? Oh sure, she could go on about the terrible suffering of the Africanised Killer Bee*, the guilt that us normal folk should feel for not hugging bees and the fact that she’s adopting a bee, but she’d be chatting shit and we’d know it. Why do we not know it when she talks about other things? I wish, with all my little heart, that we’d stop basing all our opinions and supposed knowledge on what these few say, and instead listen to the experts. Why? Because they have measured, sensible opinions that are based around their life’s work. If a similar approach were taken towards climate change and starvation in Africa I'm sure we'd reach a solution a gazzilion times quicker. Which would be good for those who are actually suffering.

And, most importantly of all, please don’t tell any celebrities that the bees are in trouble. I would actually have to send each of them a jar full of bees* and I can't be arsed to deal with hassle of being hailed a hero as a result.