The sting of truth about the bees

Alien visitors are going "to abduct the smartest organisms on the planet, and they've picked the honeybees." As explanations for the disappearance and death of bees (the so-called "colony collapse disorder", or CCD) that have occurred since October 2006, May Berenbaum's isn't exactly the most plausible; rather, she is among the entomologists enjoying their 15 minutes of fame by overhyping this crisis - or as she puts it, "a crisis on top of a crisis".

But a far more reasonable - and less alarmist - piece compares the bees to cows, in that they occupy an artificial ecosystem and would've long ago been wiped out without intensive human care, and opines that their passing will be no big deal. Heather Smith points out that the varroa mite decimated native honeybee populations between 1987 and 1994 in the US, and farmers since have trucked the remaining bees around the country and doused them with antibiotics in order to keep them humming long enough to pollinate their crops. Yet such practices have done nothing to stop the incipient demise of the native honeybee, merely weakening it for whatever other pathogens are involved in CCD.

Smith further points out that the demise of domestic honeybees will hardly mean the end of agriculture, even the farming that currently relies on bee pollination:

...the California Almond Board two-timed the honeybee with osmia ligneria—the blue-orchard bee: Despite CCD, they had a record harvest.

In short, much like the killer bee scare of two decades ago, in which we all "learned" that killer bees would unleash a spree of death by stings as they crossed the Rio Grande and made mincemeat of American flesh by massive attack and allergic reaction, the uproar over CCD is much ado about little. One should save the Doomsday talk for more realistic scenarios - some of which are to come...