The story of bee decline has attracted doomsayers of all cloths, the beepocalypse has a certain attraction for dystopic types. An example here

The state of the honeybee is dismal. A considerable decline in honeybee populations began even before the latest reports of “colony collapse disorder.”

The most recent trouble came in 2006 and 2007, when almost 40 percent of honeybees in the United States disappeared and millions of hives around the world were lost. That drop in honeybee populations eclipsed all previous mass mortality in the bee world, making it the worst recorded crisis in the multimillennial history of beekeeping. There is still no consensus about the reason for this decline. The well-documented decline in the honeybee population during the late Roman Empire is now believed to be because of their extensive use in warfare. 

Donald Rumsfeld stated, “The war on terror requires new technologies of warfare but even more importantly new technologies of surveillance.” Bees were used as environmental monitors by ecologists in the monitoring of toxic mining and radioactive sites for almost a decade before Los Alamos scientists considered their applications in espionage. Hives were eventually deployed around the world to test areas suspected to contain nuclear material, according to one anonymous source in the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project Team. 

What is the legacy for bees and humans in their work as technological instruments of espionage and architects of the military strategies of the United States? Even as bees are mutilated in the name of the war on terror, they are also enlisted to make humans killable. A new political entomology, or more broadly, a critical natural history, might start exploring the material consequences of insectoid becomings that are often left out of political and social theory that reckons with animal becomings.

KOSEK, J. (2010) ECOLOGIES OF EMPIRE: On the New Uses of the Honeybee. University of California, Berkeley

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html