Honey, I'm Gone

"Starving the planet in pursuit of one more text message with your broker seems the very epitome of going out with a whimper, not a bang."

Collapse of the Machine

The disappearance of the bees nonetheless has mythic depth. It captures intuitions people have about the human condition. A hive is an organism, like a nation. It may be made up of individuals, but it produces results beyond the imagination of any one of its members. To think of one unraveling is profoundly unsettling.

The most optimistic metaphor for our interconnected world, for example, is that by wiring up all the planet's humans, we are creating a "hive mind" with startling powers. The analogy is to the bees. You can look at a single bee for as long as you like and never guess that a large number of them would turn into an amazingly productive super-organism like a hive. What sort of wonders will humans create when billions of us come together in unprecedented ways?

Already you can see primitive outlines of such a productive transformation in Internet venues Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon, Linux, Facebook, YouTube, Second Life and all the rest.

What other unexpected things will brew in this bionic hivelike supermind?

Creating a global hive mind "doesn't cure all our ills, but it works for a lot of stuff that we would never have guessed would possibly work," says Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine who popularized the notion in his book "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World."

What happens, then, if the beehive is unsustainable? Kelly wonders. Will the new hive mind of the Internet someday fly off while we are at lunch, leaving us suddenly dumb and alone?

What institutions are next?

Naturalist Barry Lopez wonders if the disappearance of the bees is a metaphor for the end of the federal government.

"The colony collapse is the collapse of a piece of machinery like a federal bureaucracy," says Lopez, the National Book Award-winning author of "Arctic Dreams."

"It's the rise of the local. It's the biological expression of the marginalization of the federal government. It's the silver lining in the Bush cloud. It's become crystal clear. If you want the job done -- carbon footprints, climate change, really important stuff -- don't rely on the federal government. The day of contacting your congressman is over. It's the collapse of large-scale institutions."

"Not that big a deal," Lopez feels.