The New Bees - By Jimmy Petrol

As even those of you who get the news from "news" magazines have doubtless heard, the "bees" have up and gone. Of course, they're dead. What killed them is as yet unknown. The probability is that the poor devils finally couldn't adapt to the environment being too hot, too toxic, too smoggy and too full of pesticides. There are a lot of species biting it these days...we loose an astonishing number of species of little critters every year now. Just Google "lost bio-diversity" if you want to get a handle on the scope of the death that stalks the planet.

All things considered, it is a bit of luck that the bee populations have been decimated now, while we still have a viable replacement species that can be nurtured and brought into even greater numbers than the old bees. They are less efficient in the actual pollination of plants, but that is nothing compared to the job the dead bees are doing; their plants-per-bee ratio is higher, but the two bees left just can't keep up and the humans will be getting hungrier quite soon.

So in this hour of great need, we here at the Think-Tank (well, in the hot-tub) have decided to champion the Africanized Bee, or Killer Bee if you prefer. What we have to have here is a solid understanding of what is going to happen if we don't get a bunch of bees in the air and pollinating food-crops soon; everyone outside the gated communities is going to get real hungry. With this in mind, it is easy to see that the Africanized bee must be given protected status.

To do this, we want to form a non-profit group to lobby the gov'ment on behalf of this hardy little critter that has come to us in the nick of time. We want to make it illegal to kill any bees, since we are just about out of them. The upshot is that there will be a random sting here and there. The talking-heads will get to do a piece every month or so about some human that got too far away from the pack, was too slow, too stupid or too ornery and got itself stung to death. There will be lots of talk about the menace of the Killer Bees, with experts from local "institutions" giving tips on how to avoid a similar fate. There will be pet clinics like the ones they have now to teach stupid dogs that snakes are unhealthy. There will be special bee-anti-venom kits on the shelf at Walgreens. We will have "smart" lawyers running around the country with poor, stupid people who happen to be allergic to bee stings rustling up every hive they can find to poke a stick at and getting the bastards stung so the lawyers can file suit. There will be every conceivable protestation that these bees are just too dangerous to have flying around stinging perfectly innocent people. But there will also be food for the rest of us.

While the pundits proclaim that even one human life lost to the bees is too many, we will be chomping down on the corn on the cob. Where once the only people to die providing us with vegetables were the Mexicans in the fields, we will have a new, more egalitarian process which will work very much like the lottery that sent so many to Viet Nam; when your number comes up, it's up. Run. This new process will spread the risks of agriculture more evenly through the population. The people who maintain the lush, Eastern-style gardens here in the desert will be favorite hosts to bee populations and will have to be careful when lolling around the water-features. Snowbirds who flock to Arizona to golf will have to keep a sharp eye out for the hard-working and heavily unionized Africanized Bee. No longer will death by dehydration, sunstroke and overwork be the only casualties of our vegetable fields; the general population can enjoy the risk as well.

What we need here at Petrol Central are a few high-minded individuals to sign onto the application for non-profit status so we can get busy collecting money and using it to influence the legislature. If you hurry, we can get some lobbying in before the end of the current administration, which condones sleeping with government officials. But hurry. This is not an idea that has come to anybody else; get in on it early, become the CEO or whatnot of the non-profit, get yourself on Letterman and save the food supply while you're at it.

You can help by contacting Jimmy at: Jpetroulisx@yahoo.com.