The collapse of delusion
From 1971 to 2006, half of the honey bee colonies in the United States have disappeared. Since late 2006, the decline has become so severe, a new term was created to describe the condition: Colony Collapse Disorder. When CCD strikes, adult bees vanish from the colonies in a matter of days, leaving no corpses behind. No treatment seems effective in stopping it. Beekeepers estimate that 25% of US colonies have been affected by CCD, which has spread to Canada, Britain, Spain, Poland, and possibly Germany and Switzerland. The cause is unknown, as no single unifying factor has been identified among CCD-afflicted colonies.
Throughout human history, incidents of mass hysteria have occasionally involved fictional creatures. In the 1800s, England was terrorized by a devilish humanoid dubbed Spring Heeled Jack, which supposedly spat flames and jumped higher than any person could. During one week in 1909, thousands of people in New Jersey and Pennsylvania saw the Jersey Devil, a massive, horrifying birdlike creature of indeterminate anatomy. It reportedly flew over several towns, attacked a dog and a trolley car, killed numerous chickens, and collided with an electric rail. Even as recently as 2001, residents of New Delhi were attacked at night by a four foot-tall "monkey-man" with glowing eyes and metal claws. People died leaping off rooftops and falling down staircases while running away from the animal.
Ventrilo users of 2005 may remember my mid-sentence exclamation of "THERE'S A FUCKING BEE IN MY ROOM JESUS CHRIST!" As this occurred during a hot and humid midwestern summer, our unit had all windows and doors shut to achieve the most effective A/C usage. The bee came out of fucking nowhere, just appearing on the window next to me. After audibly flipping out, I found a can of Raid, sealed off the room, and unleashed chemical rage on the intruder. As I covered the bee with repeated sprays, it attempted to crawl out of the way, but was slowed and eventually stopped moving entirely. After I'd calmed down a few minutes later, I noticed there was no longer a bee under the thick white coating of insecticide.
Mass sightings of fictional creatures usually subside after weeks or months, although sightings may persist at low levels for centuries. But what if one of these collective delusions became so ingrained into the collective consciousness, it was universally propagated as fact for eons? Of the nearly 20,000 species of bees, a mere seven are currently recognized as honey bees. We teach children everything about them from a very young age: their appearance, their anatomy, their behavior, their noise, their role in the ecosystem, their danger to us, and so on. We can train them in this manner because we've all "seen" honey bees for as long as we can remember, because we were trained in the same way. Teaching this to everyone creates a situation of civilization-wide communal reinforcement, which has evolved into the most insidious, pervasive deception afflicting society.
Everyone is looking at the emperor's new clothes: if you don't see the honey bees, there must be something wrong with you, so you pretend to see them. This happens again and again until you eventually do see them, because you've convinced yourself that there must be something there. After all, everyone else sees them. You might hear a buzzing nearby and believe it to be a honey bee, which is exactly what you'll see. You'll swat at the air, others will notice and fill in the blanks, seeing the bee in front of you. You may be "stung" and develop a red welt, or have an allergic reaction, or experience anaphylaxis even though nothing's actually happened to you. People can convince themselves of anything; many claim to get headaches from the flickering of compact fluorescent bulbs, even though they operate at an imperceptible 20000Hz.
The honey bee meme has been extraordinarily successful for millennia, but the Colony Collapse Disorder meme has proven itself a formidable challenger. The BBC has even referred to it as Vanishing Bee Syndrome. Once a beekeeper learns of CCD, he hopes his colonies will remain unaffected, but the idea lurks in the back of his mind, ever-present and quite worrying. One day, he wakes up and sees that his bees have completely disappeared. He reports the occurrence to fellow beekeepers, who subsequently stop seeing their colonies. When people visit the afflicted colonies, they don't expect to see bees, and they don't. This isn't a disorder, it's just a return to order and reality. They've unwittingly taken the red pill, which is currently being distributed throughout the collective consciousness by beekeepers, researchers and news agencies. They can now see the fnords, instead of seeing honey bees. I haven't seen a single one since the summer of 2005.
I'm abeeist. Deal with it.
