Bee season has arrived early in Las Vegas, and because of the fear of "killer bees," exterminators are busier than last year:

Our warm Spring has brought beautiful flowers to the valley. Unfortunately it's also brought an early bee season, and the big concern is killer bees have now colonized in Las Vegas.

Pest control technicians are the ones to call to clean up the nests. They say last month was one of their busiest months ever, responding to two to three calls a day. But some of these bees are getting more aggressive and attack in greater numbers.

Rick Cox takes on bugs every day. He's a pest control technician who specializes in getting rid of bees.

"There is a certain amount of fear involved with bees when people walk outside and find a big ball of bees hanging out in their doorway," said Cox.

Rick has been busy to say the least. "Last month in March -- I was a little more busy than I was in March last year."

Doubtless Colony Collapse Disorder is wreaking havoc with bees, but weather is a different matter. At this stage (at least on the East Coast) the bee season is messed up because of the persistent winter cold which lasted into Spring. According to New York beekeeper Shane Gebauer, right now the weather issue is the problem:

...Gebauer, who manages Greenwich's local beekeeper supply company Betterbee, is not worried about colony collapse disorder, at least for the moment.

Northeastern New York's honeybees seem to have only one enemy this year -- strange weather patterns.

Like many other beekeepers, he opened some of his hives in early April, when the weather started getting warmer. But last week's cold snap, accompanied by several days of rain and snow, had devastating effects on some of his colonies.

Queen bees, who guarantee the success of a colony, embark on sunny, warm days to mate with upwards of 20 drones.

A queen has only a limited time to mate, and if the weather is bad, her mission will fail.

She will not collect enough sperm and will lay only drone eggs.

This is the second year in a row local beekeepers have faced weather-related problems.

Last year, many opened hives to find their bees had starved to death. Cold, damp and rainy weather persisted late into the season, Gebauer said, preventing bees from leaving the hives to collect the pollen necessary to make honey.

Yet Gebauer is hopeful this year, for most of his hives are looking strong. Despite a late start to the season, enough time remains for him to collect plenty of honey -- sometimes as much as 100 pounds per hive, he said.

But that has not stopped Philadelphia area journalist Dave Lindorff from prounouncing that there are not only no honeybees, but no pollinators at all!

This is beyond strange. It's downright scary.

When you consider that perhaps half the plants in nature depend upon pollinators like bees to reproduce, you have to wonder what a future without bees holds - not just for the animals that live on those plants, but for human beings.

And it's not just honeybees that are missing. Honeybees, after all, are immigrants from Europe, and the Americas survived quite nicely without them before their arrival with the colonists. But the native bees - ground bees and bumblebees, for example - are gone, too. The only bees I've seen since the spring began are wood bees - large, clumsy-looking, bumblebee-like creatures that bore neat circular holes into the wood of the house and lay their eggs in solitary nests. Thank heavens for them, or there wouldn't be a bee on my property.

But even several hundred wood bees can hardly compensate for the total absence of other pollinators.

What's happening here?

They look like this, and seriously, there is no way to walk around the yard without stepping on one of their characteristic holes.

[While I haven't seen so many little holes before, these solitary bees apparently don't sting.]

What the heck. I'll offer proof. Whoever took the photo for the last site placed a nickel next to the burrow for comparison purposes, but after checking, I didn't have any nickels in my pocket, so I had to borrow a couple of endangered nickels from a styrofoam cupfull of numismatic oddities I keep upstairs. I hope readers will indulge me; it is not my intent to make any comparison between the Indian and the bee (or the buffalo on the nickel's reverse, for that matter):

I don't know whether the editorialist checked his yard, but I find it a little tough to believe that there ground bees are infesting my yard, but "gone" in his.

Nevertheless, claims Lindorff, the potential causes are as dire as the consequences:

There are a lot of possible culprits: climate change, ubiquitous microwave radiation, overuse of herbicides and pesticides, stress, and lowered immunity to fungal, viral, bacterial and mite infections, or perhaps a combination of all of the above.

My feeling, though, is one of dark foreboding.

When something as basic as bees vanishes from the scene as quickly as this, you know we're in Big Trouble.

Writing on April 11 for CommonDreams.org, Lindorff declared that we're about to be killed off entirely, and that only a revolution can save us:

It wasn't too long ago that the death of socialism, the triumph of capitalism and the end of history were being widely hailed.

What a difference a few years and a few fractions of a degree in world temperature change makes!

We may still be contemplating the end of history, but of a different sort. It is suddenly becoming painfully obvious that the pursuit of profit and the philosophy of growth for growth's sake and of dog eat dog is about to kill us all off.

Now that it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the earth is headed for a global heat wave the likes of which hasn't been seen in hundreds of thousands and perhaps tens of millions of years-the kind of killing heat that in the past has led to mass extinctions-it is ludicrous to talk about things like carbon trading and raising vehicle mileage standards.

We need a revolution in the way we human beings live and the way we treat each other.

The so-called "green" politicians who talk about instituting carbon-trading schemes, about driving hybrid automobiles, about buying fluorescent light bulbs, and about turning down the thermostat and wearing sweaters, are deceiving us or themselves.

None of this is going to save us.

What will save us is recognizing that the age of consumer-driven capitalism is over.

We either come up with a new way to organize society, in which production is based upon real needs, not upon manufactured needs, and in which scarce resources are made available to those who need them, not just to those who can afford them, or we will all be doomed-or at least our progeny.

The peoples of the world-especially of the developed world, but really everywhere-need to recognize that unless our expectations are changed, unless our selfish desire for more is curbed, unless wasteful production is ended, we are all likely to be on that extinction list.

So where are the leaders of boldness and vision in politics, media and academia who are ready to tell the truth? Where are the people who are willing to listen to, and reward that truthtelling?

This is not an "inconvenient" truth we need to confront. It's a terrifying truth.

We need to change everything, and we need to do it quickly, too.

Here in America, that means an end to subsidies for suburban sprawl. There should be no more federal or state funds for road building and road repair. If people want to live miles away from where they work, let them pave their own roads. That's the only way to get people to realize they're going to have to start supporting funding for mass transit, and to start thinking about living near where they work. We need to end subsidies for agribusiness, which has virtually decimated local agriculture to the point that prime farm states like Pennsylvania and New Jersey now import all their food from the West Coast. Ridiculous!

We need to levy a massive tax on gasoline, so that no one will buy cars, and so that those who have them will drive them only rarely. Large, heavy vehicles for personal use should be outright banned. Trucks too should be heavily taxed, so that products will reflect the true cost of the environmental damage that shipping them around causes.

Electricity and home heating fuels should also be heavily taxed, with some kind of a rebate program for low-income families, so that people will stop heating and cooling large homes.

As these things are done, there clearly will be massive dislocation. People who live in hot climes like Florida or Arizona will no doubt decide they can't afford to cool their homes, and will move north. People in cold regions may decide it's too expensive to heat their homes and will move to more temperate zones. Companies like the Detroit automakers will go bust or shrink enormously. Power plants will be shut down. Oil companies will go bankrupt.

Does this mean there's no hope for humanity at all?

Actually, there's a slight possibility of hope -- provided we replace capitalism with, um, "communalism":

That all has to happen, but it doesn't mean people have to starve. We as a society need to demand a government that will help those who are displaced by the crisis to relocate and to find new productive ways to earn a living. A huge government program of investment in alternative energy systems would be able to hire many of those whose jobs are lost by the shutdown of the carbon economy.

A new ethos needs to be developed. Conspicuous consumption, egoism and the so-called "American Dream" of having it all for one's self and one's family need to be replaced with a new-actually a very old-concept: communalism.

Instead of thinking of ourselves as consumers and competitive free agents, we need to start thinking of ourselves as passengers on a boat that is sinking...

But before we can start making the huge changes that are called for-really the dismantling of the whole capitalist system and the freemarket ethos-we need to start hearing, and demanding to hear, the truth-from scientists, from politicians, from business leaders, from the media, and ultimately from ourselves.

I've mentioned Lindorff before because of his Mumia abu Jamal activism. I guess if we start by freeing Mumia while blocking Bush's attempt to avoid the gallows for war crimes, and holding 911 hearings we'll move ever closer away from capitalism and towards communalism. (Lindorff's widely circulated claim that firefighters recovered the 9/11 black boxes seems to have been deflated by the fact that one of the "firefighters" turned out to be a fraud. More here. Can't find the update from Lindorff.)

I know it's not related to bees, but Lindorff calls the U.S. troops in Iraq "baby killers" although in an interview he allows that they are at least "alleged soldiers," and says it's "nice to know" they are "reading my columns." (The latter claim is not as fantastic as it might seem. I'm sure a lot of soldiers read the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Considering what Lindorff usually writes, what's remarkable about today's bee editorial is that it's as moderate as it is.

(I've had too much fun to be disappointed, though.)

UPDATE (04/28/07): I'm not alone in bearing witness to bees. Via Glenn Reynolds, I see that Mickey Kaus's mother says her garden is "absolutely buzzing" with bees.

But the revolution is still on, isn't it?