Creating a buzz

Have you seen many drunks buzzing around? Oh my, excuse me, I meant to ask have you seen any drunken bees lately? That’s right, our science dollars (public money) are being spent to get honeybees intoxicated. Evidently, a few budding  geniuses at Ohio State University have decided that we could all gain invaluable information about alcoholism by getting a bunch of honeybees ripped–as in, three sheets to the wind.

Hey, I am an absolute advocate of science. I would love my grandsons to become scientists, mostly because I believe that the world is in desperate need of very smart people. But I’m sorry, when I hear that a couple of “scientists” are feeding ethanol  to poor, helpless bees, it makes me think that science has run amuck. Do we really need to spend money on getting bees tipsy, so we can realize that drunken bees “do less grooming, fall over on their backs and can’t get up?”

Oh, by the way, did you know that honeybees are normally very social? It seems that when they get drunk, they become aggressive and reclusive. Why spend money on this type of bogus research? Instead, just go to any bar at around two in the morning, read how many people get killed in drunk‑driving accidents, and visit a few women’s shelters. Hey, it doesn’t take a dollar or a genius to figure out the effects of alcoholism. Leave those honeybees alone.

The real question that science should be trying to answer is: “Where have all the honeybees gone?” The number of honeybees is dramatically declining and the outlook for crops,  flowers and honey has become alarmingly dismal. Newspapers around the world have been  running articles on the mysterious disappearance of our beloved honeybees. It seems that the worker bees are just leaving the queen and abandoning the hives. Yikes,  is it possible that these bees  are drunk?

There is much speculation about what exactly is happening to the bee population. Some scientists believe a virus is killing as many as 25 percent of the beehives. Other experts  wonder if Africanized bees are taking over the planet.  It is just one more unsettling fact that our environment is in a mess, because without bees, we’d better start enjoying plastic flowers. One depressing report in the Arizona Republic claimed that without bees to pollinate the crops, we would all be left without fruit  and vegetables.

Quick, grab an apple, enjoy your broccoli, and smell the roses. Oh, and if you happen to see any drunk bees hanging around the booze at a barbecue or picnic, send them home to their hive immediately. They may not be able to fly drunk, so we all need to join together to stop their “buzz” and help restore their broken homes (oops, I mean hives). Drinking and flying do not mix.