I just learned from a respected colleague and professor, the honeybee population of the USA and Europe is in sharp decline.  Bees are leaving hives in swarms and dying. (they can’t find their way back—and is a swarm supposed to come back???) Very odd.  I did some quick research to verify this “startling statistic” and we have indeed lost about a quarter of our domesticated bee population.  That’s scary because about 1/3 of our food supply is reliant on bee pollination (according to my professor friend and what I read on the internets [sic]).

 Now, being a conservative, and since there’s plenty of environment left (just enough for us) I immediately came back with a capital idea to make money on the situation.  We’d pollinate ourselves using high tech machinery!  Probably find a way to do it better than Mother Nature Herself!  AND we can make money doing it. 

 Then my left brain caught up with my right . . . THAT would be expensive (because nature provides the service virtually for free) and would raise food prices.  Of course, what do I care, I’m actually rich (must be nice) but compare me to the rest of the world, where I make in a few hours what they earn in a year and I can’t feel so smug anymore. 

 The loss of these bees makes beekeeping more expensive, which raises the price of food (scarcity of bees + utility of them = value of their service, added to the cost of production).  If we invent high-tech mass-pollinating machines we raise the price even further.  The end result is the higher price of food puts regular, affordable nutrition just out of reach of those who need it most.  End result: my all-you-can-eat buffet at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas will go up in price, and a lot of people in the Third World will actually starve. 

 But hey, my conservative brain thought—that’s just Malthus!  Eat up!  Then the left catches up again, you mean the third world, like India and Pakistan and North Korea with their nukes?  Oh . . . I guess that really does make it MY problem . . . better bomb Iran right now . . .

 Sometimes, I learn that some of my cherished conservative values are actually molehills that are just too expensive to die upon.

 (RIGHT Brain) Then again, maybe we should just import migrant labor to do all the pollinating for us by hand . . .and oh my, how I really enjoy those crab legs at the Wynn . . .

(yeah crab legs have nothing to do with pollen--or do they?  =p)