Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Arena Magazine

Letter from America: Hillary and the honey bees: Mark Wagner sees a curious lesson in markets and politics.

Article Excerpt
We live on five acres of wood, weeds and wetland; in the middle of our field I keep a couple of hives of bees. We use the honey on toast and in cooking, and the bees help the garden. And while keeping bees is not a fun hobby, it keeps me in touch with some curious people. This spring, my small cabal of beekeepers was drawn into consternation: beginning in March, America's front pages and web news sources began to run much discussed articles about disappearing honey bees. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) became the darling of media news conglomerates; even Brain Williams and Katie Couric were making references to Rachel Carson. Here are some of the suggested causes of CCD presented by the media:

--The beginning of Rapture

--Bees becoming disoriented due to the plethora of cell phone towers

--AIDS had arrived for the bees

--Genetic engineering had gone awry

--Pesticides

--Aliens had launched a plan to take over the planet by collapsing the food chain

The American book and movie market had laid the groundwork for the nation's interest in bees: The Secret Life of Bees (Kidd, 2003); Robbing the Bees (Bishop, 2006); and still in my aesthetic memory, Peter Fonda's great work in Ulie's Gold (1997), the movie about a bee keeper and his amphetamine-addicted daughter. What place these books and...