Bee Theory

I've been interested in the disappearing bees for awhile. One of The Farmers told me the most plausible theory I have heard to date. It blows the cell phone signals theory out of the water.

Like so many other things, it comes done to climate change... The bees will get confused when there is a warm day in the winter and think it is spring. The workers fly out to collect pollen, but alas there is no pollen to collect. The workers return and the active hive is hungry, so they eat out their stores. It gets cold again, and they go back into hibernation mode, but their reserves will no longer last them until the real spring rolls around. So they fly off... perhaps to look for green pastures (yellower pollen?), but more likely to die. Some can't even attempt the escape from the hive and lay among the honeycomb.

As I recall a large portion of the keynote address at my graduation from U of R was about disappearing bees (it was the hippest news story of 2003). It kind of made sense I suppose, we were the Yellow Jackets, but the speaker related the bees disappearing to us graduates 'disappearing' out into the 'real world'. Kind of a grim comparison if you ask me most of these bees probably just flew off somewhere and died, but oh well.