Beeware!

The keeping of honeybees became one of the cornerstones of agriculture as farming grew more intensive - without them a great many of our non-cereal crops would fail. It's alarming, then, that in the past several years entire hives of bees have been emptied by Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The causes of CCD are poorly understood, but it is clear that we've been widely mismanaging our bees for several decades now. The spread of the varroa mite, malnutrition caused by substituting sugar water for harvested honey, and exposure to a variety of pesticides all appear to contribute to CCD. Lately, though, it appears that the bees themselves have at least been attempting to manage their exposure to pesticides.

The worker bees who harvest pollen for the hive are apparently not able to discern between pollen that is clean and pollen from flowers treated by pesticides, but within the hive the housekeeper workers who store the pollen away can tell that there's something wrong. They "entomb" the bad pollen in special cells lined with disinfectant propolis resin - however, this last-ditch effort does not save the hive - the entombing of pesticide-laden pollen is seen in hives that subsequently succumb to CCD. It does, however, indicate that the bees know that something bad is afoot and are trying to do something about it.

I am no apiarist, but the way that hives affected with CCD are simply abandoned by all the worker bees makes me wonder about the subtle mechanisms that keep a hive together in the first place. The chemical and behavioral communication that allows a hive to make decisions as a single entity must be breaking down. Humans also live in hives - made of concrete instead of wax, and tied together with electromagnetic communications instead of pheromones. What poisons - literal and figurative - are we managing? What are the things that keep us together in societies and allow us to cooperate? And should we perhaps be paying a little more attention to them?

Read more here: Honeybees 'entomb' hives to protect against pesticides, say scientists via guardian.co.uk