What If Bees Disappeared? Angie's Nightmare

Today I'm in a singing mood, fluttering in the sun with the plan to discover something new. In fact, shall I say it? Escape from Alcatraz! With all due respect to my hive and its social status, every now and then the rebel in me quivers for freedom. I have an idea churning inside my head, more powerful even than the search for nectar and the orange blossom tree that my gluttonous sister Tatiana told me about. To find a bee that is wild, free, alien to rules, without a hive guarded by the beekeeper. A bee that is not apis mellifera, as we 'domestic' bees are called. I want to find out what it's like to live in an independent commune, who knows, maybe they will welcome me among them? Want to put that peace? Never hear another lecture from my mother, the queen bee! Or of all her trusty friends, ready to remind me of the relentless rules of trophallaxis and division of labour.

So, I flew further and further away from the beehive. I don't remember how many kilometres I flew, but many, many! I will tell you at once what I discovered about my free-roaming sisters. About a third of the solitary bees nest in holes in the wood, made by the larvae of other insects or that they dig themselves, as in the case of the wood bee. The others nest in tunnels that they dig in the ground, often trying to stay close to their own kind. In fact, what a coincidence, I came across a miner bee!

"Nice to meet you, my name is Angie, and you?" She squares me from head to toe, with a very wary look on her face and goes, "Where are you from? You smell uptown, you!". I remain a little astonished. If I were a human, I would almost blush, almost. "Well, I am an explorer bee!", I reply in a proud tone. I immediately want to show her what I'm made of. May I not be mistaken for a snob! "See, see, but where do you live? I've never seen you around here." "I live in a beehive quite far from here." "Ahhh! I could have sworn! A beehive! You're a slave to the system, then," she sneers. "Why, don't you, on the other hand, have a hive to go back to at night?", I ask in amazement, "don't you have a beekeeper to look after you and your sisters?" "Sisters? What are you talking about! I don't want relatives in my boxes, I'm single and I keep to myself." I was intrigued as hell. I made her tell me about her way of life. She is a very strong bee and she digs, digs, digs.

When the excavation becomes deeper, it also uses its abdomen to push out the earth, which forms small mounds at the tunnel entrance. Depending on the species, tunnels have different shapes. They may have a vertical central axis, from which lateral tunnels branch off, at the end of which there is a chamber, which she insulates from moisture with substances secreted by a gland in the abdomen, in which an egg is laid with a supply of pollen and nectar for the larva. Once this is done, the entrance to the chamber is closed with earth, and she starts digging another side tunnel. The excavated material is deposited in the previous tunnel, so as to avoid bringing earth to the surface. "But do you know, young lady, that soon there will be no more bees like me? Biodiversity is in crisis, I can no longer find sufficiently varied food sources. Remember me, you could tell your grandchildren about having met the last wild bee".

I felt like crying... Oof, but why be so stupid as to destroy a planet as beautiful as ours? I put myself on a mallow flower to rest. In my head, I had a thousand strange images coming to me. Here, for example, a dodo. A kind of giant turkey: 'I used to live quietly in Mauritius, I didn't bother anyone,' he tells me. 'One bad day man came, in 1598. He brought with him animals I didn't know. Dogs, cats, pigs, who were killing me to eat me. Man decided not to breed me, because my meat was no good to him. So I became extinct. Then, a sea mink appears in front of me: "Angie, I will tell you my sad story. I used to live in the North Eastern part of America. The natives only hunted me for personal use, to feed themselves and their children. Then, the Europeans arrived and started killing us intensively, to sell our skins. I became extinct in the second half of the 19th century'.

Here comes galloping a Quagga, which in the front resembles a zebra, in the back a horse. "I lived in South Africa and got into trouble when the first Boer Dutch settlers arrived. The white man with his guns started hunting me. But I was not easy to breed and they already had their cattle to graze. My last specimen was a female, kept at the Amsterdam Zoo, who died in 1883'. Oh God, help! I wake up, sweating, panicking. It was a bad nightmare, just a dream. We will never go extinct, our beekeeper is there to look after us! We will never become extinct like these poor animals. These are things that happen in dreams. Yeah, but only if we all finally wake up and stop fooling around!