(A bee I found hiking up Mt. Missouri in Colorado at ~14000 ft. above sea level in July 2016)
The first girl I ever loved fell in love with bees at the age of 18. She earned a scholarship and moved to Mexico where she fell in love with a man who lived on a farm that produced honey. She never explained to me what she found particularly interesting about bees. The fact that she was interested was enough to peak my interest. I started learning about the decline of the honeybee. I started learning about the history of beekeeping and their beekeepers who seem just as worn down as the bees themselves.
Bees produce food. Pollination is life. Bees are sick and the world will reflect this harshly, if it already hasn't.
Some people think pesticides are wiping out the bee population. Some people think it's a bee-blood--sucking mite called the Varroa Destructor. These beasts are so apt at destroying a colony, when a hive is infected it calls for sure destruction. The mites latch on to the bee and feed off of them like leeches until the bee is too sick to pollinate and dies. Scientists have a hard time figuring out problems that have to do with human based changes to the climate.
We do know that bees -- honeybees in particular make up a huge proportion of the pollination population. The honeybee decline is so bad in some parts of the world that humans are forced to pollinate flowers that were once pollinated by nature.
Sometimes it feels like life is so stressful that it's hard to care about the things that once scared you as a kid because you didn't understand its nature. If we do not become more in tune with nature and learn to love it and nurture it, then it will slowly fade like memories from our childhoods do.
