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I’ve had my mouth engaged about this since last winter, but my mind is only starting to catch up. Bee mites have been a problem for years so when I heard about Colony Collapse Disorder I conflated the two issues. The Varroa mite has been troubling bee keepers since the eighties, but the current rash of Colony Collapse Disorder was first reported in late 2006, according to The Economist.

My first hypothesis was market concentration of commercial hives. With only a few vendors supplying most of the bees in the country, it doesn’t take much to mess up the supply chain. But last night I had a conversation that was running toward Bayer and Gaucho. The implication was that the agrichem industry has so fucked up the environment that the bees don’t want to live here anymore. I can’t find a substantiating study, but I can look out my window and see brown fields where every weed is dead and the April rains are moistening sterile soil in preparation for a crop of “Round-up ready Soybeans.”

So I don’t have the answer right now, but all the -cides out there — herbicides and insecticides — point to a world that is increasingly unsafe for bees and other living things. Let’s keep our eyes open and be ready to shut down the bee killers when we figure out who they are.

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