An unceremonious funeral

Knock! knock!

Who's there?

Honey!

Honey who?

Honey. Collected from the combs of five hives whose winged inhabitants succumbed to the cruelties of survival and whose bodies were now being ruthlessly scraped into heaps on the ground in order to collect the last of their livelihood from their hives. 

If you laughed, I would seriously recommend getting an x-ray of your heart, you know, just to see if its there. 

Today at Riverview, Mira and I were put to the task of cleaning out the trays of honeycomb used by the tragically deceased hives. A rather casual autopsy was done by Oren, who concluded that one of the hives had died of starvation (because the bees were found burrowed into the honeycomb,desperately trying to find food of some sort) (do you realize how sad this is? This would be like finding a body halfway into an empty fridge or cupboard), one or two had lost a battle with a bacteria that caused dysentery (which can happen if the hive experiences a drought- like the one this summer) and one was also speculated to have possibly been choked by the freezing fingers of winter (because the bees were found clustered together). Especially intriguing were the last two hives, which were not filled with carnage like the others. With only fifteen or so bodies within the combs, Oren speculated that these bees had gone through COLONY COLLAPSE.

"What's colony collapse?"

Prepare yourselves my friends, because it's a panic unlike any other. More imminent than economic collapse if we continue our current governing strategies. More powerful than the supernova of a collapsed Red Giant. More shocking than an earthworm with a collapsed lung (fact: earthworms do not have lungs). It's sudden. Unexplained. A mystery.

I hope you didn't get too worked up because this may be a disappointment.

A colony collapse- or if you want to sound medically educated, Colony Collapse Disorder, or if you want to sound educated and cool, just straight up C.C.D- is when a colony of bees abandons their hive for no obvious reason. Apparently, unexpected desertion like this is common. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, one third of all colony losses have been attributed to CCD. That's not a good statistic for the bees or the beekeepers. There are actually researchers who have tried to pinpoint possible causes of CCD. Though none are currently supported by definitive evidence, there are four main focuses suspect to the crisis: 

Pathogens: though no specific one can be attributed to the total occurrence of CCD, there is correlation between hives infected with viruses and hives that eventually collapse. 

Parasites: Along with the absence of bees, another common indicator of a collapsed colony is the presence  of mites, specifically the varroa mite (I think Oren mentioned a hive that had mites?). Researchers believe that these parasites may transmit viruses that affect the colonies and cause CCD.

Bad Management: Stress brought on by long journeys of migration and overcrowding in artificial hives has also been thought to cause CCD. If this is the case, beekeepers of malpractice need to hang their heads in shame, have flour, butter, milk, and sugar stuck to their legs, be squeezed into an averaged-sized kitchen with a hundred other people, and forced to make bread all day (and then have half of their labor eaten by individuals of a "superior" species without profit). Don't worry, the hives at Riverview were not abused.

Environmental Stressors: Also our fault. This could include having bees exposed to pesticides or having access to pollen of a limited diversity or low nutritional value. Living near contaminated water could also be another factor. 

Currently, the consensus is that it is probably the perfect mix of assaults from above that bombard a weak hive at a vulnerable time.

And as I've come to learn, bees are quite vulnerable.

Hava, a really smart girl (maybe even smarter than Oren) who often helps at Riverview and is a student at Lawrence (and Lawrence's first beekeeper), informed us about bees and their ease of becoming susceptible to disease (not as good as Mira's poem but hey, I try). See, bees, like the offspring of generations of incest, do not have a lot of genetic diversity. This makes them have a weak resistance to a lot pathogens, if they penetrate the hive's walls. I'm now going to make another, seemingly digressive comment about Hava, that will actually directly transition into another main point quite smoothly. Hava has a great vocabulary. Today, she used the word "fastidious" and though I never learned it's meaning for the SAT, I will always remember it now because, when used to describe bees, it characterizes them as nature's innate germaphobes. Hava explained that, while they lack internal immunity, bees create environmental immunity by keeping their hives in tip-top shape via the removal of parasite-infected larvae and constant, fastidious cleaning. 

While we were excavating the combs, Mira and I noticed that, while some where filled with the recognizable honey-colored yellow we associate with the food, others were combs of sticky blackness. Hava said this colored honey might be from buckwheat nectar. Rachel mentioned this to us earlier this summer as well- the color of honey depends a lot on the type of flower it's nectar is taken from. The well-known colored honey in most commercial products is clover honey, which is popular for its sweet taste and light texture. Buckwheat honey is less sweet, but loaded with antioxidants and helps boost immunity (apparently you can use it as natural cough syrup as well). When I was in France, most of their honey was Chestnut honey- which has an almost reddish color. Apparently there are over 300 different types of varietal honey in the U.S. alone. Do we even have that many ice-cream flavors?

We don't get to talk to Hava often but it was nice to have a conversation with her today, and I sure learned a lot- look at the size of this post!