Word: honeying
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...typically stressful day for a honey-bee, in terms human hive-dwellers can understand: "You stagger off a coast-to-coast red-eye flight and chug a Pepsi for breakfast to revive. You hop in your rental car and head for your business meeting, but wouldn't you know it, the GPS is malfunctioning in the car and you get lost. You show up for the meeting late, edgy, and shaking. You have to excuse yourself to hit the bathroom because you've got a stomach bug and antibiotics just aren't helping. Not to mention the fleas that seem...
...Lowdown: You can't finish this book unconvinced that our food supply is in serious danger. Although Jacobsen doesn't solve the CCD mystery, he presents ample evidence that the current state of affairs - "rented" honey bees that are shipped coast to coast to pollinate crops - is unsustainable and stressing the insects to the max. Pointing out that 80% of our food relies on pollination at some point in its life cycle, Jacobsen's concern for the fate of the honey bee population is easily contagious. He offers the same prescription as most authors writing about our modern food supply...
Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis By Rowan Jacobsen Bloomsbury...
...Gist: By exploring the mysterious phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that is wiping out honey bees worldwide, Jacobsen lays out a case for why we need to care - and it has very little to do with honey. A spiritual successor to Rachel Carson's seminal eco-polemic Silent Spring, Fruitless Fall walks us through the various theories put forth as causes of CCD -genetically-modified crops, global warming, God's wrath, cellular phones, loss of habitat and a nicotine-like pesticide to name a few. Jacobsen concludes that a return to simpler times - for example, before honey bees were...
...what a "hive mind" - the highly organized honey bee hierarchy - looks like when it's suffering from CCD: "There were usually a few bees, yes, but they were wandering without purpose like survivors of an apocalyse, which they were ... Great lobes of the hive mind had died, and what bits remained had lost any organizing principle. If this was a mind, it was one with advanced Alzheimer's disease...