Ok, this is kind of off my usual range of topics, but it's a little too odd for me to ignore without posting about it.

As some of my previous posts have alluded to, I spent last Saturday taking pictures of a friend setting up his new bee hive.  I'll be posting up a separate (and long) entry about that soon enough.  If you want the entire process, you can check out my 222 photos over on my Flickr set titled Beekeeping 101.

What I find a little odd is that even though I have no real interest in bees and I don't subscribe to any bee-related RSS feeds, newsletters or websites, a lot of my feeds have been suddenly flooded with bee posts.  A prime example is this one over on The Online Photographer (I'll post some comments over there when I'm done with this).  The author (Mike Johnston) goes into some hypothetical questions about what we as a society would do if it was proven that cell phones are causing the decline of bee populations.  I have to note that this is not some chase of fantasy, as several other sites have mentioned the same thing...  CoolSmartPhone, Engadget, Sci Fi Tech (Sci-Fi Channel), Tribe, etc.  I'm guessing a vast majority of these started up because of the article that ran in The Independent on the 15th (although other major rags have run similar ones).

Anyway...  Stories like that have been popping up all over my RSS subscriptions over the past few days.  I just thought it was rather strange that I'd just finished shooting the install of a hive right before all these starting flooding in.

So, what do I think about the whole "bee death" issue?  Well, I don't really think about it at all.  Honestly, this is just not something I really care about.  I'm not saying that I won't care in the future, it's just not really a pressing concern for me (yes, I'm kind of shallow at times... this is one of them).  Personally, I don't like bees.  They sting (duh).  They're not cute.  They interfere with my outdoorish activities.   Seriously, what's to like about all that?  Sure, the whole pollination thing is going to be an issue, but it's not enough of an issue (to me) to get past my whole general dislike of bees. 

Don't get me wrong, the whole bee photography thing was kind of cool (even though I did get stung), and there are a few shots that I'll probably always be relatively proud of, but it didn't make me a "bees are cool" convert or anything. 

Ack, I'm rambling again.  Ok, I'll sum it all up...  The whole bee death phenomena and the timing of it in regards to my recent photo shoot is weird.  It'll suck if bees everywhere start dropping dead and it'll probably have a huge impact.  But, I just don't care that much about it... yet.

Note: In case you want to comment on this, rest assured that I'll approve any comments from unregistered users as long as you keep the following in mind...  If you use fowl language, I'll edit it.  If you use enough foul language, I'll just nuke the post.  If you are selling something or want me or my readers to go to another site not related to this topic or my blog, I'll nuke the post.  If you enter the same comment multiple times, I'll nuke the post.  It's my blog and I can manage it however I see fit.  Deal!  My family reads this, be reasonable.  Disagree and post your opinions all you like, just don't be a jerk about it.  I'm pretty liberal, so chances are I won't nuke anything that doesn't directly go against the above. I'm only posting this because I used far more external links than usual and Google seems to really pick up on that, so it's possible a number of people who normally wouldn't come here will want to flame me based on this one post. All your bee are belong to us!

Monday, April 16, 2007 9:55 AM