Bumblebee Memorial

June 28, 2013 · Filed under Uncategorized

SwampMan drew my attention to this little news item when I was cooking breakfast:

Fifty thousand bumblebees will be honored at a memorial Sunday in the same shopping center parking lot southwest of the Portland, Oregon, where most of the insects died earlier this month.

Rozzell Medina, of Portland, said on a Facebook page that the event will “memorialize these fallen lifeforms and talk about the plight of the bees and their importance to life on Earth,” The Oregonian reported.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/06/28/memorial-to-honor-50000-bumble-bees-that-died-in-oregon-parking-lot/#ixzz2XVyoE4uY

“Who counted ’em?”

“What?”

“Who went around and counted all those dead bumblebees?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, how do we know that it was 50,000?”

“What?”

“How do we know that it wasn’t 5,000? Or 500?”

“What?”

“Do they have them lined up in tiny caskets in groups of 100?”

“What?”

*sigh* Fifty thousand sounds like a wild-assed guess to me, and wild-assed guesses are HUGELY inflated for the ain’t-it-awful factor. I shall hereby meditate on the life of bumblebees and their plight, to wit: Their lifespans are from one to four weeks in length which they spend in toil to feed the bumblebee young, then they die. At the end of the summer, the queen and her last group of workers die, leaving a few queens to overwinter if they’ve gained enough weight and found a good hiding spot from the cold.

Well. That sucks.

Okay, I’m done meditating now.

So, are the folks attending the bee memorial service going to initiate memorial services for mealworms? My daughter feeds her leopard geckos a truly astounding number of mealworms and crickets per week. She causes the deaths of untold thousands of these insects per year and, so far as I know, hasn’t memorialized them or meditated on their life meaning even once. She’s also responsible for selling flea treatments for puppies and kitties. Yes, people. She is responsible for the deaths of unsung millions of fleas per year. Where, I ask you, is their memorial service?

Let’s move on to the higher forms of life. How about the mice, frogs, rats, rabbits, ducks, and chickens fed to snakes every year? Shouldn’t they get a memorial service, too?

What about the wind turbines that are killing an astounding amount of avian life? Can we just set up a memorial and meditation garden at each of those sites, with perhaps a statue as representative of each bird (or bat) species killed by the flying blades? Then we can do a ritual mourning once per year which would include rending our clothing, chanting about the sacredness of life, blowing up the towers, and suing the shit out of the windmill manufacturers and electric companies forced to buy the electricity produced “greenly”. Hmmmmm. That’s actually a memorial service that I would even pay to attend. I’d bring a cooler with iced-down beverages and some gluten-free snacks, too, and stay awhile to watch.

You might say “Swampie, why are you mocking these people? They obviously have sincere beliefs about the sanctity of all life.” Riiiiight. How many do you suppose are members of pro-life groups that protest ripping viable infants out of their mother’s wombs and stabbing them to death?