Dead bees are a symptom of modern farming

It’s a recurring disaster that can seem like a biblical plague: bees cropping up covered in parasites, with deformed wings, or slaughtering their own larvae. Sometimes workers will vanish from the hive altogether, leaving the queen and her offspring abandoned, Mary Celeste-style. The coming months are shaping up to be an epic year for such devastation. As many as 70 percent of U.S. honey bee colonies will be lost, researchers at Washington State University said last month, thanks to a combination of factors such as disease, hunger, and poisoning. To those of us who aren’t farmers or beekeepers, such numbers can seem mysterious, and apocalyptic. It’s not always easy to see why a hive is failing. Even scientists aren’t exactly sure what causes colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon that’s grown rapidly since the mid-2000s and is characterized by a sudden disappearance of worker bees. It’s inevitable to think of the deaths as something akin to a divine judgment — pestilence visited upon innocent insects, as nature’s punishment for the sins of our industrialized farming syst