For several decades, colony collapse disorder (CCD) -- a mysterious condition where entire bee colonies die for seemingly no obvious reason -- has been inflicting bee populations across both Europe and the US. But scientists from the United Nations (UN) say the phenomenon is now a global crisis, afflicting bees across China, Japan, and Africa, as well as in other places...
"Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature," said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director. "Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature's services in a world of close to seven billion people."
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Hi Thom, I've been meaning to thank you for posting this link. Many people in this community may know that honeybees and the issue of Colony Collapse Disorder has been close to my heart since beginning to write my Master's thesis on the symbolic nature of Colony Collapse.
Some of the conclusions I explored in that work was how mythologically, honeybees are symbols of the soul, and their mass disappearance can be viewed as the mass soul loss we seem to be experiencing collectively as a culture. Like the bees who are vanishing (actually dying alone far from the hive because they can't get "home"), our egos tragically are moving further and further from something sacred (the hive) that sustains us and find ourselves unable to return. Also, bees have long been linked with the goddess and so their mass vanishing indicates the loss of the feminine in our society.
Meanwhile, as scientists continue to be mystified by this mass vanishing, I think many of us who understand something about depth psychology can deeply appreciate what you are saying about how we can not separate ourselves from nature. Bees have the smallest immune system in the world and if they aren't the canary in the coal mine....
One book I read also referred fleetingly to the idea of "Civilization Collapse Disorder"... and the signs are awfully telling. I wrote a blog about the bees back in December which you can read here if anyone is interested: http://www.depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/the-symbolic-.... It also links to my thesis if you want to read the whole thing....