The Bees of Roanoke Island

Today at work, I overheard that 80% of the honeybees are missing.

It was the word "missing" that made me laugh. I know bees pollinate most of our vegetation and that it's a serious threat to the ecosystem if bees are in short supply and all that, but the idea that the bees were missing made me laugh. They weren't dying off. They weren't migrating away. They weren't failing to procreate. They were missing.

For the hell of it, I Googled "Where have all the bees gone?"

(Sorry Google. I know I'm not supposed to use Google as a verb. I like Google, and I understand trademarks, and I don't want to be a part of the gradual and unwitting move toward common usage that will steal Google's trademark from them...but "Google" is what I did.)

I got 1.48 million results for "Where have all the bees gone?", and many of the top results were local news stories. One of them said, "entire colonies stand empty..."

That's when I wrote the email to one of my co-workers with the subject line, "The Bees of Roanoke Island". He didn't think it was funny, but I couldn't help it. I wasn't WILLFULLY entertained by the imminent demise of civilization or anything like that, I just couldn't help thinking about how "entire colonies stand empty" would be received if these were people.

Well, actually, we knew. Because it happened at Roanoke Island and we're still talking about it a couple of centuries later. We're still speculating.

So forget all the gloom and doom about what's going to happen to us without the bees...let's theorize. Were they kidnapped by aliens? Killed off by a rival civilization? My personal pet theory is that they've gone off together to a remote island, where they're stockpiling pollen and plotting to take over the world once we all die off from lack of vegetation. But I'm sure there are other possibilities. And those ominous colonies standing empty are just begging for a story.