Honey, I'm Gone

"From an ecological standpoint, it is opening up the possibility for local pollinators like the mason bee to come back." Honeybees, after all, are an introduced species. They were brought here by European explorers and settlers. The Indians called them "white men's flies."

Lopez sees local people creating local food using local means in a turn to self-reliance and resiliency, away from a global system that uses water in the desert of Arizona to create cotton to ship to China to be made into T-shirts to be sold at malls in Maryland.

But maybe this is over-thinking the situation. Bill Joy thinks the collapse of the bee colonies is a harbinger of our increasingly complicated world coming apart.

"I think that we will see many more such 'era of limits' mysteries, some of which turn out to be difficult to impossible to unravel, as causal wires of which we are unaware, many of them nonlinear, are tripped," says Joy, the respected former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, who has warned of the accelerating pace of technological change leading to dire results for mankind -- up to and including the possible destruction of the human race in a generation.

Exeunt Omnes

In seeking the meaning of the bees, perhaps we can take solace in our culture's great exit lines.

Take your pick:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," F. Scott Fitzgerald reminds us at the end of his masterpiece, "The Great Gatsby."

The movie "Shane" ends: "Pa's got things for you to do, and Mother wants you. I know she does. Shane. Shane! Come back! 'Bye, Shane."

In the 1954 film "Hondo," the final words are "Yup. The end of a way of life. Too bad. It's a good way. Wagons forward! Yo!"

"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." -- "The Diary of Anne Frank."

"God help us in the future." -- "Plan 9 From Outer Space."

"Every exit is an entrance somewhere else." -- the Player in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."

"Good. For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble." -- "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."