Bee problem solved
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about bees disappearing by the millions. I’ve been wracking brain for some hours now figuring out why and have gotten nowhere. Nobody knows what happened to those bees and I don’t either. Upon this realization, I sat down in my thinking chair with a cup of honey and set out to find a work-around for the problem. And I did–it took me about 10 seconds. Now that’s smart thinking.
Here’s my idea: adopt a bee. Well, not just one bee–two bees. Exactly two bees, one male and one female. See, I realized that the biggest problem in the bee community is that the dominant queen represses all of the other girl bees keeping all the men to herself. But what if she isn’t fertile? Or what if she dies or disappears? Those girl bees need to know that they’re just as a good as the queen and they can be moms too. There are tons of female bees just sitting around in hives with nothing to do. They aren’t allowed to reproduce with the male bees because the queen said so. We need to free the bees.
I consider myself to be a very reasonable man. I don’t expect everybody to adopt two bees. If there’s about 6.6 billion people people in the world [1] and only 1 out of 100 adopted a pair, we would immediately have about 66 million new couples ready to restore the bee population to its former glory. Now, suppose each female bee were to lay 2000 eggs in the first year (this seems like a lot, but it’s only about one day of egg laying [2]) and only half survived to adult beehood. Then, by the end of the first year, we would have turned 66 million bees into 66 billion. That’s 10 times the human population in just one year. Assuming a male to female ratio of unity, the next year’s bee population would increase to 66 trillion. That number is larger than the gross world product measured in USD [3].
So, there you have it. The bees will be fine but it will take commitment on our part. I suggest that community leaders designate about 0.1% of their subjects as foster bee-parents. The entire community, of course, would be expected to chip in but the primary parents should have the time and means for this monumental task. I plan to assemble a crack team of zoologists, statisticians, botanists (boring) and historians to draw up formal plans and submit them to leading non-profits for review. In particular, we are hoping to win the support of Häagen-Dazs and their Help the Honeybees foundation (http://www.helpthehoneybees.org). All proceeds from Moonscreen sales (http://www.moonscreen.info) will be put toward this noble cause. I suggest readers buy a tube of Moonscreen to protect their skin from harmful moon-rays and our bees from almost-certain extinction.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
This is a new terror in my life. When I was a kid I remember seeing bees everywhere. Now I can’t recall the last time I actually saw a honey bee. This is frightening because bees are responsible for the reproduction of a very large percentage of our vegetation. I’ve been running searches for a few hours now and the thing that I seem to find at the end of every search is pesticide. More specifically pesticides made from modified nicotine. Bees don’t have to eat the stuff. They just have to land on a plant that has had some contact with one of these poisons. I’ve read that this stuff scrambles their senses, destroys thier immune systems and eats their digestive tract.
I think you have a good idea, though I’m not sure how it would work. Are you in a position to make the right people listen?
God help us.