Honey, I'm Gone

He is. But his "theory" fits the facts as well as other wild surmises. These include a secret plot by Osama bin Laden to destroy American agriculture, and "the rapture of the bees" as a harbinger of end times.

No Stinging Indictments

What about the comment attributed to Einstein that "if the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination . . . no more men!"

"That gets to the heart of the story," Pettis says. "I don't personally believe that the bees are the canary in the coal mine. You don't have to bring in larger human destruction of the environment. I can see things going on in the ways bees are managed that explains it."

For example, it turns out that not only does U.S. agribusiness grow more than 80 percent of the world's supply of almonds (who knew the world consumed so much marzipan?), but in February, when all those groves need to be pollinated, fully half of the commercial beehives in the entire United States are trucked to California's Central Valley on 18-wheelers. Big-time beekeepers constantly haul their bees all over the continent to service the next crop of apples, blueberries, watermelons or whatever. Their bees are the planet's hardest-working migrants.

Scientists have a hunch that this may be stressful. They do not yet have the data to prove it. But some commercial beekeepers seem to be hit harder than others, suggesting that their management practices may be a fruitful area of inquiry.

If this hypothesis were to hold up, the implication is that some corporate bees around the world are heir to a combination of problems that may or may not be faced by honeybees kept by small-time operators, not to mention the honeybees that have escaped into the wild. All pollinators are in decline, according to a recent National Academy of Sciences study. But it is by no means clear that colony collapse disorder affects any of the 17,000 other species of bees known to exist, or the 13,000 additional species of bees estimated to exist, not to mention the 200,000 other species of animal pollinators such as beetles, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and even bats. This also leaves aside the two-thirds of the world's food that is pollinated not by critters, but by wind and rain, such as the grasslike crops that include corn.

None of this, however, has decreased in the slightest the buzz emanating from humans seeking moral lessons in the domesticated honeybees.

Particularly disappointed by the lack of evidence are those rooting for an indictment of the cellphone.

"We now know it isn't cellphones, alas, alas," says Pamela McCorduck, the futurist and author of "Machines Who Think."

"I so longed to shut such people up with a sanctimonious 'You're killing the bees, you clod!' "

"There are bees at the pool and I haven't been able to get rid of them for 10 years," says John Brockman, the author and literary agent who works the intersection of culture and technology. "Now I go to the pool, whip out the cellphone, point it at them, and say, 'Call on Line 1!' "

"I don't think anyone really has a clue as to what's going on, but if it turns out to be cellphones, it's the greatest metaphor in the history of metaphors," says Bill McKibben, the best-selling environmentalist author of "The End of Nature."