the mystery of the dead bees

This past Saturday, as I was walking from Blaine to Lynden, I spent a large chunk of that trek on Birch Bay-Lynden Road. I couldn't help noticing, as I was walking along, that I would encounter a dead or dying honeybee on the road's shoulder about every twenty feet. Now, why would this be?

I assume there aren't as many bee carcasses on the actual road because the passing cars would whoosh by and blow those tiny bodies to the margins. But how can we explain the regularity of the distribution? At one point, I thought about videoing the bees with my digicam; those bodies, showing up at such uncanny intervals, were genuinely creepy.

I remember reading last year about problems with our bee population-- bees that were losing their way and dying by the millions. Could this be a related phenomenon?

Your thoughts?


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