North Star Writers Group

We human beings need you far more than most of us realize. In fact, the world’s entire ecosystem needs you to hang around and do what honeybees do. For starters, make honey. This delicious substance has healing properties we do not yet fully understand, although recently published research suggests that honey can prevent amputations in diabetics by healing infections that are impervious to antibiotic therapy.

You also make an amazing, edible wax that can be combined with other ingredients to make ointments that soothe away itches, aches and pains. You have never been taught architecture or geometry, yet you know the inherent efficiency of hexagonal design and put it to good use in constructing your honeycomb homes out of that wax.

You are indeed the wisest of Winged Ones.

Most critically, you are the world’s irreplaceable pollinators. You honeybees provide as much as 80 percent of the pollination needed by agriculture and the entire ecosystem, sharing the burden to a lesser extent with some kinds of bats and other insects.

Without your constant wandering from petal to bud, from bud to bloom, carrying life-giving pollen on your bodies and spreading the wealth, many crops will fail. Crops like alfalfa, almonds, apples, avocadoes, blueberries, cantaloupes, cherries, cranberries, cucumbers, pumpkins, raspberries, sunflowers, watermelons and so many more.

Many flowers will also wither and die away. We will lose the ornate, colorful and fragrant blooms that we so cherish and enjoy.

If you honeybees depart, the world will be less beautiful and humankind will be in danger of starvation, since your pollination efforts account for one-third of all food crops. Ironically, obesity then might well become a thing of the past, but the price of such “health” is much too high.

We human types are searching for the causes of what we quaintly call “colony collapse disorder” (CCD). This disorder - if it really is one - has caused the destruction of more than half of all commercial honeybee hives in affected states and is showing up in Europe as well.

The term “commercial” may hold the key to the mystery. Winged Ones used as commercial pollinators are held captive in hives that are then trucked thousands of miles to where crops are located. This arrangement keeps you from leaving your hives to dispose of your body waste, as you do regularly in the wild. We human beings object most strenuously to living in our own waste. Being forced to live in your own waste may well be the origin of the fatal mites and parasites that are killing you.

There are multiple other CCD-origin theories as well, but this one rings true. Since actions always speak louder than words, perhaps your mass departures are not a disorder but instead a message, if only we have enough acumen to heed it.

You are tying to tell us that our way of life has become unsustainable. That we cannot deprive living beings, like honeybees, hogs, chickens and cows, of sunlight and room to roam and expect them to remain healthy. That we cannot hope to survive while poisoning the land, sky and water with pesticides and depleted uranium bombs. That we cannot keep our sanity while tied to our work 24/7 and enduring nightmarishly long daily commutes. That we cannot return to health while rushing to stuff ourselves mindlessly with food that has been processed out of all connection with its origins.

Thanks for a much-needed warning. May others of my kind take heed and may we all change our ways before it is too late and you are gone forever.

Fly in peace, Winged Ones and friends, wherever you roam.

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This is Column #CT035. Request permission to publish here.