by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA
Food & Health (botanical)
Remember Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie? It wasn’t just the Bee Movie’s collaboration with McDonalds that had a lot of nature lovers confused—it was also the fact that it featured heroic male “pilots” flying off to get honey. When even this poor excuse of a failed beekeeper knows that all the work in a hive is done by women. The guys are just kept around for breeding. But the makers of a new iPhone game are suggesting that may have to change, if Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) keeps killing off all the ladies.
Created by London-based Honey Tribe Studios, Honey Tribe: Colony Collapse is due to launch soon, and its makers claim it will use “simple, fun gameplay and likeable characters to tell a story that is based around the facts of colony collapse disorder (CCD).” This being a game, of course, the “facts” are being mixed up with a certain amount of poetic license, including the interesting—but rather depressingly unrealistic—notion that male (or drone) bees could pick up the slack for female bees dying or falling ill:
All the worker bees are ill! If nobody can go out to collect the nectar there won’t be any honey to feed the brood. The hive won’t survive the winter! Help Corbee to venture out into the forest and collect enough nectar to keep the hive alive. It’s been his dream to go out exploring but the real thing might be scarier than he imagined…!
Just how well the game communicates what is (and isn’t) known about Colony Collapse Disorder and the plight of the honeybees remains to be seen. As we learned in our live chat with leading entomologist and bee expert Professor May Berenbaum, CCD is a complex and hard-to-diagnose phenomenon. But anything that can help raise awareness of bees, and the importance of protecting them, can only be a good thing in my book.
(Source: www.treehugger.com )