It’s an X-Files moment. Or an alternate take on “Children of Men.” It would be such cool science fiction: All the honeybees on Earth disappear, or at least a good chunk of them disappear fairly rapidly over the course of a few months. Gone without a trace. All those teeming swarms you rarely stop to think about, gone. Silenced. Who’s going to make all that honey for my Crispy Honey Toasty Oat Os? Who’s going to pollenate the fruit trees and all that other agricultural crap?

But more importantly, where did they go? Back to their colony on the dark side of the moon, to feed and nurture the giant Space Queen who’s going to launch the invasion to retake the Earth after millenia of waiting? Back to their underwater lair for the thousand-year Transformation? Has the Hymenoptera Pied Piper set up camp in the backwoods of Idaho and begun calling his horde home? Where oh where hef dem goed?

But the scary part is that it’s really happening, and happening quickly, and no one knows why! If you haven’t heard news reports about it yet, you will soon.

My own feelings about this extinction (if it comes to that) are complex, because I have a complex relationship with all striped black and yellow flying things.

On one hand, there’s the burning hatred, instinctive and deep, stretching back to childhood. I’m deathly allergic to them. The last time I was stung I spent two days in the hospital covered in red puffy welts and white blisters, pumped full of antihistamines and adrenalin by IV. Whenever one starts to hover near me, I freeze and become frantically panicked at the same time. As soon as the thing lingers or lands, I kill it. I take great joy in killing it. I can’t help it. Granted, I get much more joy from killing wasps, because something about those long dangly legs seems obscene and makes them much more evil. Well, malicious and taunting anyway, and less useful in the sort of communal, symbiotic sense that gives some people the warm and fuzzy feeling about bees.

On the other hand, there’s my love of bee pollen as a nutritional supplement. Sure it’s good for you, boosts yer pep and whatnot. But the coolest thing about it is that you’re eating pure information rendered into material form. 'Cuz what else is pollen but plant DNA, and what else is DNA besides pure information? I’m not going to get into the pros and cons of eating animal DNA in this forum, though the subject has been broached in The Straight Dope and many other places. Plant DNA doesn’t carry the same connotations, so I feel much more free to talk about it.

Unfortunately, that’s as far as thought goes: eating pure information is cool. The fact that there's an insect that gathers it up and presents it to the person or machine who packages it and ships it so I can buy it fresh at Whole Foods? That’s pretty cool too.

And then there’s the hypernatural unexplained way that bees navigate and communicate and function as individual nodes in an enormous network, with that wacky little “This Way to the Honey” dance they do, and all the rest. That’s pretty cool too.

But what’s not cool at all is this: (1) that they’re dying; and (2) all the crackpot head-up-the-arse cockamamie notions that people are coming up with to try to explain the disappearance. My Space Queen idea isn’t really all that outlandish when you consider some of what I’ve been seeing.

From craigslist:

In case you haven't heard, Cell phones are killing us.

They are fucking up the bees. The bees are getting fucked up by the radiation from the phones and coming out the hives retarded.

They are NOT pollenating!

If they don't do that = WE ALL DIE

IT IS TIME TO KILL THE CELL PHONE AND GO STAND IN LINE WAITING ON A PAY PHONE

That actually sounds uncannily like an ex-girlfriend of mine.

This theory is treated as a possibility by actual sources as well (well, actual British sources): The Independent.

And then there’s the guy who’s figured out how to profit from it. My favorite quote from his write-up: “Of course, it's not just an issue of losing blueberries and broccoli. Farmers stand to lose a lot of money.” (Because that’s by far the hugest consequence of a bee extinction.) And to be fair, further on down he does admit that the nearly 100 crop species in the U.S. that rely on honeybees for pollination constitute about 1/3 of our diet. But that pales in comparison to the farmers’ loss. We can always just eat more beef, I suppose.