The Crossed Pond

It’s bad enough having bees scheming to take away our world and all we hold dear, but using them as contract muscle to resolve disputes between children?

An Indonesian schoolboy who was facing “serious abuse” charges for causing a bee to sting a classmate has been cleared by a court, reports say.

The boy, believed to be about nine years old, had allegedly placed the bee on a girl’s face where it stung her.

Her parents reported him to the police who arrested him. He faced up to three years in prison.

Lock up the diminutive species traitor and throw away the keys, I say.

In a rare victory for the forces of All That Is Good, the silver-haired black Epeoloides pilosula — a species of bee, foul nectar-loving, freedom-hating socialist pigdog threats to all that is good — was thought extinct.

Alas. The bastards are back, courtesy of power line corridors in New England. These corridors, ostensibly created to connect human residences to electrical power, are revealed too late as a network of invasion paths for the bee menace, small stripy cylons* with a Plan.

We’re doing it to ourselves.

*Note how close to “pylons” that word is? Coincidence? I think not.

Some kiwi potential terrorist has nicked over a million bees.

Thieves have rustled more than million bees from a Matamata beekeeper.

John Tyler lost 28 hives, and their 1.125 million industrious inhabitants, in the November 7 or 8 robbery from a Te Poi farm paddock, the Matamata Chronicle reported.

Each hive contained about 50,000 bees, weighed 25 kilograms and was worth about $7500.

The robbery of his winged workers, requiring at least two men and a truck, has left a bitter taste in Mr Tyler’s mouth.

The hives were not insured.

“(I’m) stunned, I suppose. I’m pretty upset,” he told the newspaper.

If you’re wondering, that’s a black market value of a nickel a bee.

Dude goes up to stick it to the bees. Later, he is found dead. The Medical Examiner fell for it hook, line and honey-coated sinker:

Larry Cameron of the Medical Examiner’s office told CBS4 News, “The man’s death was not in any way caused by bees. He had hardening of the arteries. He had a heart attack.”

Fortunately, the story does have a happy ending:

After Acosta died on the roof, the apartment complex managers called in the company, Bird & Bee Removal, to get rid of the bees. “We got rid of all of them by spraying them with chemicals,” said company spokesman Rolando Calzadilla.

Good man. However, Rolando takes nothing for granted and takes pains to point out:

He said there could be other hives as well.

Bee vigilant, my friends.

Add the British hotel industry to the list of collaborators and species traitors.

Chuckle of the day.

Lou Dobbs must be smiling like a smug, self-satisfied, tedious, undertalented and overimportant sanctimonious blowhard* as 60 000 illegal immigrant Italian bees are discovered in Florida, where they are doubtless stealing the resources that would otherwise go to decent, upstanding, English-speaking American bees. Alas, they are being allowed to stay, once again profiting the Roman Catholic Church:

The bees will be kept alive and used for pollination. And the St. Nicholas Monastery will use the massive honeycomb that was found to make candles.

It’s only a matter of time before terrorists creep into the country under cover of the bee menace.

*It seems like a safe bet. Depending on how much and when he sleeps and whether he smiles in his sleep.

Rowan Jacobsen, who has written a book on the end of the honeybee, on how mankind can survive once the stripey menace has been vanquished.

No mass starvation, because the grains that make up the bulk of our diet are not at risk. (Wind-pollinated.) So we’d have corn, bread, oatmeal, etc. And certain fruits, such as grapes, are wind-pollinated or self-fertilizing.

And then there’s human pollination, as they’re doing in China. (Take millions of peasants, hand them bundles of chicken feathers, and let them climb through the fruit trees, touching every flower with a bit of pollen from a bucket.) What we’d have is extraordinarily high prices for most of the fruits and vegetables that provide our vitamins and antioxidants, if they could be found at all. And the beef and dairy industry, as Michael Pollan has pointed out, is switching more and more away from natural forage to corn, even though corn makes cattle sick, because it’s cheaper to feed corn and administer antibiotics to sick cattle than it is to use nature pasture. So we’d still have a beef industry, though a freaky one.

We’ll never be truly secure until we have a bee-free economy. We need an Al Gore led initiative to make America pollination-independent.

Or, we can continue to have this:

While we’ve all been distracted by such trivia as the Presidential election and the complete collapse of the economy, mankind’s greatest enemy has been patiently plugging away. Now comes the news that not only do they outnumber us mammals, they will soon be aware of the fact, as they have apparently discovered mathematics.

En garde, America! The only thing worse than a bee is a bee with an abacus.

A new outrage in the eternal bee-man war as bees push a man off a cliff:

The man, who is in his early 30s, was hiking alone around 5:30 p.m. when he left the trail to hike up a gully and was ambushed by hundreds of bees.

“He was waving his shirt and then he was actually just full of bees,” said hiker Ken MacKenzie, who witnessed the incident.

After the guy fell 200 feet down a ravine, the bees followed and apparently attempted to feast on his flesh:

Phoenix police Officer Craig Churella was the first responder. He tried to reach the hiker but was forced to retreat.

“He was absolutely covered in bees. It was quite the sight. I couldn’t get any closer — they started attacking me,” Churella said.

How much more of this must we endure before America wakes up to the threat of the stripy invaders?

The Asian Giant Hornet can apparently murder huge numbers of honeybees (disturbing youtube video with angry fighting music soundtrack here).

Lest we forget the bees’ evil ingenuity, however, note the behaviour of the Japanese honeybee as described in the wikipedia article:

When a hornet scout locates and approaches a Japanese honey bee hive it will emit specific pheromonal hunting signals. When the honey bees detect these pheromones, a hundred or so will gather near the entrance of the nest and keep it open, apparently to draw the hornet further into the hive or allow it to enter on its own. As the hornet enters the nest, a large mob of about five hundred honey bees surrounds it, completely covering it and preventing it from moving, and begin quickly vibrating their flight muscles. This has the effect of raising the temperature of the honey bee mass to 47 °C (117 °F). The honey bees can just tolerate this temperature, but the hornets cannot survive more than 45 °C (113 °F), and die. Often several bees perish along with the intruder, but the death of the hornet scout prevents it from bringing reinforcements which could wipe out the colony

For every solution, a problem.

Not satisfied with infiltrating the American government, the International Bee Conspiracy has commenced operations against their British counterparts. As usual, the bees have their human puppets on hand to make supportive statements:

Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeeping Association, said: “Beekeeping is still reeling from the varroa mite, which carries a number of viruses and which devastated thousands of hives across the country when it reached Britain ten years ago. Now there is a real danger that colony collapse disease – which has wiped out 80 per cent of bees in parts of the US – will appear in this country. Unless we develop effective protection, there could then be massive losses of bees across the country.”

So, they won’t just be taking over the world and relegating humanity to the status of honeymine slave, they’ll be using our tax money to do it. Why not just hand them a gas stove to heat the testicle forks we already sent them, hmm?

There’s no point in distinguishing between “killer bees” and the relatively good kind. They’re ALL killers. Savage, remorseless killers. Now that a beagle has been martyred in the cause, will Andrew Sullivan take notice?

Giant evil prehistoric frogs?

Stripes. The Mark of Evil.

Merry Christmas to The Crossed Pond! A gift of a beehive and beekeeper training has been sent to a needy family somewhere in the world, in recognition of TheCrossedPond’s dedication to bee-related causes.

Heifer International provides livestock and training so that families can improve nutrition and earn income for health care, shelter and education for children. Each gift multiplies because every family that receives a Heifer animal promises to “pass on the gift” by giving one or more of their animal’s offspring and knowledge to another family in need.

The gift that keeps on stinging. Much thanks to our reader(s).

The bees have selected their candidate. I guess we know who TCP WON’T be backing.

There have been few critics of all things Clintonia from the left as kos. All throughout the campaign he, like I, hasn’t put much stock in Clinton’s inevitability aura or high poll numbers. I’ve had different theories about why that’s not so important, but kos’ is worth taking a look at too:

Hillary has put together a sort of “coalition” team of consultants and advisors, spanning the ideological spectrum of the party. My reasoning was that this coalition would hold so long as she was in the lead. But as the other candidates got better known and she started slipping, that coalition would fray and they’d start using the press to fight their internal turf battles, further accelerating her decline.

Essentially, that the moment the campaign began hitting a bit of friction in the road, they’d start doing donuts. The idea behind it, though unarticulated by kos, is that with no discernible ideology or even rationale behind the campaign, what you get instead is a very well-organized beehive, but full of bees of all kinds of different species. They’re held together on sheer functionality, influence, and the fact that it’s the biggest hive in town. They work well enough, even being a humming model of efficiency and power…until somebody starts taking out chunks of comb, at which point they all go apeshit and start stinging each other to death.

What that analogy lacks in scientific accuracy, it makes up for in prognosticability!

On the eve of the final Iowa debate before the Jan. 3 caucuses, Clinton campaign insiders are increasingly questioning the cautious, poll-driven approach taken by Mark Penn, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top political aide, sources familiar with the situation say.

With Clinton barely holding her own against Barack Obama and John Edwards in Iowa, dissatisfaction is growing with Penn, who some say has mistakenly run Clinton as a de facto incumbent.

“There are two people who have come up with this strategy — one Hillary Clinton and one Mark Penn,” said a top Clinton ally, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Mark wanted to run her, basically, for re-election, and we are seeing what happened.”

Said another Clinton camper: “The heat’s on Mark. … He’s got a lot of enemies.”

Kos has a post synthesizing these things that’s worth taking a look at, sans strained bee analogies.

We have been catalogueing, for some time, the vile excesses of the world’s bees, giant communist collectives plotting the downfall of God, truth, the American way, apple pie, white picket fences and the right to shoot your senile neighbour who accidentally wandered onto your land.

This time, however, the bees have elevated their wickedness to obscene levels as they interrupt a cricket match. A test match, no less.

This is, has to be, war.

There is, I think we can all agree an ongoing media conspiracy, intent on restricting certain information from reaching the masses.

This group of shadowy figures has actively intimidated journalists who report on this, obfuscated or shut down outlets that publish on this, or sometimes these reporters simply disappear.

And yet there is now an organisation out there willing to risk everything to compile and host all information available on the web in one place.

This bastion of freedom is the holy grail for those of us aware of the menace that is killer bees.

The worlds first Compendium of Killer Bee Attacks.

It makes for a sobering read, and is not for the faint of heart. Be warned.

I think I can speak on behalf of TCP when I say, if we ever endorse any product, it would be the Sting Shield Insect Veil.

Because what we need is for computers to behave like bees.

Think of it as bees, humanity’s eternal stripy adversary, zipping around the planet at the speed of light, into your home, your workplace, wherever you take your laptop.

DON’T DO IT.

You fools. You damn beautiful bastard fools.

‘Killer Bees’ Descend on New Orleans

MERAUX, La. (AP) – Africanized honeybees, a fierce hybrid strain sometimes referred to as “killer bees,” appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the state agriculture commissioner said.

A swarm of the bees was captured about five miles from where demolition workers found a colony of Africanized bees in January, commissioner Bob Odom said Tuesday.

The most recent find was close enough to the earlier find that the bees might have come from the same colony. But they might also have flown ashore from a passing ship or barge, Odom said in a news release.

“Although the exact source can’t be identified, we have to assume Africanized honeybees are now established in the area and people should be careful when working outside,” Odom said.

The Department of Agriculture and Forestry keeps traps along a north-south line through the state and at all deepwater ports to monitor the bees, which are smaller and more aggressive than the European honeybees raised for honey.

“Because Africanized bees have been labeled ‘killer bees’ for years, there’s an idea around that they are bigger than European honeybees,” Odom said. “The truth is they’re actually smaller but a lot fiercer.”

Next stop, upstate New York.

It may be that a virus present in healthy Australian bees is causing ‘colony collapse disorder’ amongst feeble American bees.

Also:

Bee researchers will now look for stresses that may combine to kill bees.

Damn right. Attack is the best form of defense. Take that, stripy Agents of Evil.

Enterprising spiders in Texas have spun a 650-foot long web.

In the eternal battle of bee and spider, there can be only one.

Once again, people react to fear by rushing into totalitarianism. In this case, our 9/11 is colony collapse disorder, sparking an open call in The Times of London for a Bee Master.

The mere thought of it gives me hives.

Last week, the bees fired an opening PR salvo, using their now well-known total control of humourous magazine, The Onion, to taunt us. Now, via Wonkette, we have what can only be described as the secret temple of a shadowy bee cult. Bees are claiming that they are responsible for a wonder drug, they have gotten their agenda high in Congressional priorities and themselves onto the nation’s stamps.

The bees are coming. Bee skeptical of what you hear and read (apart from what you read on these pages).

It has begun. The buzzing march to a New World Order commences in the British town of Hoddesdon.

As many as 30,000 of the stinging insects formed a black cloud on Tuesday as they tried to colonise buildings in Burford Street and High Street, including the historic Clock Tower.

Shoppers and passers-by rushed indoors to escape the swarm, which council workers feared would attack members of the public.

David Sorrentino, the owner of nearby Changes Hair Salon, said: “There were a lot of worried people around. You wouldn’t think it’d happen in Hoddesdon.

“It’s one of those things you think would happen in Texas.” Dave Tully, who was working in the town at the time, sprung into action to warn mothers and children about the swarm.

“They were swarming for quite a bit before they started to congregate on the side of a building,” he said.

“When they started to group back together it was about the size of a car windscreen. The shops kept shut.”

Brave, brave Dave Tully. We will remember your courage, as we lay your sting-riddled corpse to rest, so horribly distended by the effects of massive amounts of bee venom that dental records were required to identify you (you were going to need a root canal and a couple of minor fillings, incidentally, so you dodged a bullet there). You are the first, but certainly not the last, victim of a long and stripy war.

They’re murdering dogs. Your children are next.

The article also contains some excellent advice for dealing with the bee peril. In particular:

…stay away from all bees.

You know it’s good advice. We at The Crossed Pond don’t wish to cause unnecessary alarm but, for God’s sake, be terrified.

Our doom is near, it’s stripy and it makes honey.

Through their secret control of The Onion, they have put this story out to humiliate us.

Don’t be fooled. Bees are pure stripy pollen-obsessed evil.

Hat-tip: Laura.

We have been concerned, with good reason, about the rise of the bee menace. Not content with ruining our economy and food supply by pretending to die off in large numbers, they have started to adopt aggressive tactics in their mission to dominate the open spaces of this Great Country. It can only be a matter of time until they use cloning and selective breeding techniques, of the type that our short-sighted luddite governments prefer to deny us, and create a race of hideous dino-bees.

Well, fear not. Birds eat bees. At least, I am pretty sure that they can. If they are hungry enough. And, sure as fossilised eggs is eggs, hideous dino-birds eat hideous dino-bees.

The time is now. Paging Jeff Goldblum, star of hideous genetic manipulation movies. Your country may need you.