(Sorry if the title sounds imitative of the Connie Francis song, but occasionally I'm stung by spontaneous outbursts of nostalgia.)

Perhaps I should have titled this post "where the disappearing bee stories aren't" because the more the bees don't disappear, the more the disappearing bee stories do.

I guess it's tough to get people to take stories about disappearing bees seriously when they can go outside in their yard and see bees.

Anyway, in light of my previous posts, I thought it was a good time for an update. Yes, there are still honey bees in my yard. But the cherry blossoms they were pollinating last week are losing their petals, and I'm pretty sure the pollen is gone. So the bees are making their way around the yard, and right now they're pollinating some sort of small purple weed flowers. The picture on the left shows what's going on in my yard right now. They're clearly European honey bees, but whether they're commercial I don't know. I doubt it, as I live nowhere near any farms, so they're probably just feral descendants of some long-forgotten beekeeper's bees. The bees that seem to be suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder are the ones that get boxed up and trucked around, and they've been kept going for decades with regular dustings of miticides. Whether this is good for bees and how long they can be expected to compete with wild insects is of course debatable.

While it's been blurred by scary stories about "NO BEES," the distinction between domesticated and wild bees is nonetheless attracting the attention of at least some environmental activists:

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.

"We've been pushing them too hard," Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the CBC. "And we're starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances." Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it's all of the above. (24)

But in any event, there seem to be plenty of bees in plenty of places.

In Idaho, there were enough bees to pollinate this Spring's crops, but there's still chatter about Colony Collapse Disease elsewhere:

Idaho producers had enough bees available to pollinate crops this spring despite what's being called colony collapse disorder, but commercial beemen moving hives across borders are hearing other tales in neighboring states.

There definitely is a shortage of bees, particularly in California, said Tom Hamilton, owner of Hamilton Honey LLC in Nampa, Idaho.

Washington state, where Hamilton was working hives during the first week of May, was also more concerned than Idaho about the issue, he said.

"Washington has a larger tree fruit industry," Hamilton said. "As a honey industry, we're working with Washington State University to develop what we hope will be a world class honey bee research program. The fruitmen are backing us up, and we hope all the media attention on colony collapse disorder will help us get the program started. We need research to help us deal with diseases, and colony collapse is a good example of why."

In the U.S. it's so bad they have even coined a new name for it, colony collapse disorder.
"Bees are an indicator of how the environment is doing, it's like the canary in the coalmine," said Tillsonburg beekeeper David Brandon.
"If the bird dies, miners run.
"Well, if the bees are dying it's bad news for all of us,"
He then quotes Albert Einstein who is said to have remarked decades ago that if someone killed off all the honeybees, man would be extinct just four years later.
"No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

"Most people don't realize this, but more than one third of all our food comes from plants that need to be pollinated by bees," Brandon said.
There are all kind of theories out there, everything from genetically modified foods to global warming, insecticides, radiation from cell phone towers and even fungus.
Brandon said in the States, Congress is taking this very seriously and has set aside $75 million to investigate and more than 100 scientists are now looking for the cause of the die off.
Brandon lost 75 per cent of his hives, but many beekeepers have lost even more.
"I had 170 hives, I have 45 left, but I know many other people had 90 to 100 per cent losses," he said.

Brent Halsall, president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association is taking a more conservative, or should shall we say careful position.
"I get the media calling me every day asking if this is a crisis, but I won't say that," he said.
"Certainly this is a serious situation," Halsall said, "It's not good."
But he is also quick to point out the ministry and beekeeper groups agree Ontario is not suffering from the American colony collapse disorder.
He said, in the U.S., bees are leaving their hives to die and any attempt to install new bees into those hives fails.
Even bee pests like small hive beetles or wax moths won't go back into those hives. Something bad is in there and scientists are trying to find out what it is.
The situation in Ontario is different. A difficult fall with low pollen and nectar counts and the sudden onset of very cold temperatures in February caught many colonies off guard and bees died.
"We are experiencing a very unfortunate coming together of a number of different factors," Halsall said, "but it's not CCD."

And, please bear in mind, that the CCD problem involves domesticated European honey bees. Not the Africanized honey bees which have made their way from south of the border. In Texas recently, 135,000 AHBs were removed from the walls of a town home, along with honeycomb which had taken a decade to build:

Officials said the size of the hive and numbers of bees inside of the walls led experts to believe the bees may have been building honeycomb for nearly a decade.

It took beekeepers several hours to remove the bees from behind the wood panels.

But elsewhere in the South, some people steadfastly maintain there are no bees at all -- foreign or domestic. In Atlanta, the Editor of the Tribune-Georgian sounds pretty steamed up. He claims he "not seen a single bee in his yard so far this spring" and speculates about the cause:

One study recently completed by German researchers indicates a more insidious problem. They postulate that the electromagnetic radiation put off by the millions of cell phone towers and other wireless communication networks may be putting out enough juice to scramble the bees' innate navigation systems, preventing them from finding their way back to their hives.

If this is the case, I will take a fresh cantaloupe over my cell phone any day. But if this theory does pan out, expect a massive and vicious response from the telecommunications industry. And no, it's not feasible to fit each of the billions of bees in the U.S. with little metal helmets to stave off the "buzz" of EM radiation we've added to the landscape.

I doubt such piffling details as the microwave theory being dismissed by its own scientific researcher will concern the Editor in Atlanta. Because -- well because microwaves are just plain evil. They're irradiating our "juices." (I hope that doesn't include my precious bodily fluids, but I've heard rumors....)

Even if colony collapse disorder is eventually tracked back to a pathogen or a pesticide, the theory about the EM radiation really got me thinking about this huge experiment we are currently conducting on the planet and on ourselves.

Between the ubiquitous wireless phone networks and the burgeoning wireless internet networks - both the local ones people maintain in homes and businesses, and the more widespread ones that cover entire cities or regions - we have greatly increased the amount of EM radiation in our daily lives.

You can't see it and you can't feel it, but at some point, you just have to wonder if we all aren't slowly scrambling our DNA as we microwave in our own juices.

Why, it's almost too much.

I mean, why are we worried about dog overpopulation when the bees are all gone because all life is being cooked to death in a vast electronic stew?

There is already a strong link between heavy cell phone use and brain cancer and there is a growing body of evidence that cell phone radiation kills brain cells. Are we just setting the next generation up to be senile before they hit 50?

Sheesh.

But with the few remaining brain cells I had left after the editorial, I gamely continued my trek around the country to search for bees.

In North Carolina, the story is similar to Idaho -- plenty of bees there, but obviously the bees are missing somewhere else:

"There is something real out there," Hopkins said. But he added that so far, North Carolina has not seen the problems that other states have experienced.

"There are some that are concerned it could happen to them," Hopkins said of North Carolina beekeepers. "And there are others who have lost bees for whatever reason that are convinced that they have lost bees to this. Our office is trying to determine if that is the case or not. Really, we haven't seen the conditions that have happened in California, for example."

Researchers have said that over the past century, there have been instances of unexplained mass honeybee die-offs, Hopkins said.

David Tarpy, North Carolina's state apiculturist and an entomologist at N.C. State University, said it is not unusual for beekeepers to lose 30 percent to 50 percent of their bees over the winter. They die for different reasons: starvation, varroa mites or diseases.

Scientists such as Tarpy must track down why they die or disappear. But there is no test for pinpointing colony collapse syndrome, he said, because they don't know what it is.

Again, where is the catastrophe? And, quite frankly, if this Atlanta Journal and Constitution story is any indication, I'm a bit skeptical of the Atlanta Tribune-Georgian Editor's cooked-in-juice claim:

For [Beekeeper John Pluta] and most other Georgia beekeepers, the honey-making life is sweet, with occasional stings. They have weathered dropping honey prices, pests and, this Easter, a freeze that shut down nectar flow in the tulip poplar. The most serious new problem facing apiarists, colony collapse disorder, has had only a marginal effect in Georgia, according to University of Georgia entomologist Jennifer Berry.

Pluta says he lost about 18 percent of his bees over the winter to various causes, small damage compared with 80 percent losses reported by some beekeepers elsewhere in the country.

It can be challenging at times, but I'm doing my damnedest not to stew in my own juice.

Anyway, I am pleased to report that in my yard, the bees are still there.

A SYMMETRICAL AFTERTHOUGHT: After writing this post, I find that the stingers of nostalgia are still embedded in my brain. Thinking the matter over with the few brain cells I have left, it occurs to me that there is no reason not to end this post as I began it -- on a note of bee nostalgia.

So here's Ricky Nelson, signing "Honeycomb":

I can't think of a sweeter way to end the bee scare.