I kept bees for quite a few years.  Had as many as 15 hives at one time.  I love the bee community, the hive mind that is completely mysterious to me. 

I have followed the bee decline story slightly and have been worried about several aspects of it.  Anyone who has kept bees would find the current hive collapse very unusual.  Bees don't leave hives completely, they will swarm and decimate the population, remove a good portion of the available honey in the swarm activity, but what I have read on this current situation indicates the bees, the hive, just disappears.  And the empty hives are not being robbed by other hives.  Beekeepers could usually tell a hive that had died by the weird activity at the hive as it was being robbed.  It's nothing like the usual pattern of bees coming and going for forage.

I think Einstein's concern about the apocalyptic consequence of bee extinction is reasonable.  I hope we can figure out what is causing the bee decline and address it, but I doubt that we have the species wisdom for this crucial step.

Like global warming, if the solution requires that we look at globalization, corporatism, unrestricted capitalism, we will run into the defenders of the status quo.  Even if we can show that the railroad track leads to a brick wall, there are the defenders of authority and tradition who will absolutely oppose any suggestion that the tracks and the path ahead need some scrutiny. 

I suppose we will hear the usual pathetic story from those folks that sun spots or liberals or the media are causing bees to die off.  Just look at Mars, do you see any bees there?  Amazing lunacy. Amazingly criminal irresponsibility. 

Seven generations.  An indigenous code of responsibility, a realization and actualization of the interconnectedness of all life on the planet. 

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." President Dwight D. Eisenhower April 16, 1953