The Sweet Taste of Success?

 

I am Bombus ruderatus, son of a murdered mother, husband to a feisty woman with a sting in her tale, and together with my cousins we are the humble bumble bees, and we will have our revenge in this life.+  You will recognise me as the aerodynamically challenged insect that bounces from flower to flower. 

Draw near and I will tell you a tale that began aeons ago but nears its climax in these modern times. 

When the world was young, we all lived in harmony. We the pollinators sipped on the nectar that the flowers offered as payment for our insemination services. The fruits of our labours culminated in sweet honey to feed our colonies. The fruit lure that swelled and encased the pollen impregnated seeds attracted the animals which fed upon the life-giving food, and they in turn dispersed the seeds in their dung or as an agent of locomotion, moving them from one place to another.

But then the monkeys came. They pillaged the flowers and fruits indiscriminately. Over time they evolved into more and more sophisticated versions of nature’s prototypes, in a process dubbed natural selection by a human called Darwin, but even he had stolen the ideas and terminology from others, including his own grandfather. His dishonest treachery is ironically a distasteful example of the selfish process of the survival of the fittest in action.

The evolution process driven by the survival imperative of the selfish gene continued for millennia and is still active to this very day. Branches off humanity developed and died, leaving Homo sapiens as the ultimate winner of the evolutionary arms race.

Their intelligence manifested itself in many ways. Art, music, science, medicine and technology. But this sentient self-awareness did not stop them from exploiting the world for their own ends.

Animals were domesticated and slaughtered and cruelly illtreated and many were hunted to extinction, but humans didn’t care, they just moved on to another innocent species to satisfy their voracious appetite. Even their own kind were not safe, and murder, slavery and genocide continue to this day, with their weapons of destruction becoming more and more effective at mass killing.

But we insects were also not safe. At first, we could survive the monkeys raiding our colonies in search of our honey and grubs, but serendipitous discovery of our homes was not enough for these selfish, greedy people. They captured us, bred us into more efficient honey producing machines then robbed us and pacified us with sugar substitutes.

They forced smoke into our hives, masking the scents we use to communicate with each other when attacked, and evoking the fear of life-threatening wildfire, impelling us to consume valuable honey to protect it for recolonising a new home in case our old one was destroyed. This ingestion makes us lethargic and less aggressive, so we sit calmly by while the human intruder steals our food sources.

If this enforced slavery is not enough, they perversely destroy the very wings that feed them. Profligate indiscriminate use of insecticides kills friend and foe alike. Neonicotinoids put thousands of insects at risk of death and those that survive are severely cognitively impaired making navigation to and from the hive difficult or impossible. Our immune systems are weakened, and we fall prey to viruses and parasites inadvertently spread by our keepers, or should I say imprisoners and executors? Despite legal bans, the UK Government and others have found ways around the law and still we die.

But paradoxically, their intelligence and unrivalled ability to despoil and ravage every inch of the planet will be their downfall. They are rapidly turning the planet against themselves. So, successful? I will let you be the judge of that. Their limited time on the earth so far is but a blink of an eye when compared to the chronological reign of the dinosaurs whose ancestors still live today.

Another human once wrote ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?’*

And our reply? ‘No the doomsday clock stands at one minute to midnight and the destruction deadline looms as each remorseless second ticks to towards the final countdown for humanity.’

And will there still be honey? Yes, but not for them. The world waits with bated breath. And me? Well I just keep bumbling along.

 by Steve Parnwell

+  With acknowledgement to Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator

*Rupert Brook 1912 The old Vicarage Grantchester

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