With myths about razor blades or GMOs in candy, pedestrians running down children, and sugar rushes, not to mention belief in ghost and UFOs, October needs some science help.
So we are creating National Happy Spectral Apicology Day beginning October 16th next year. Bees are important but the apparition of them dying off remains undetectable. Yet honey bees are important, if you like honey - or are in a business where you need to rent them, like almonds. Outside honey bees, we don't really know. We don't even know how many species there are, because tens of thousands of bee species don't have hives to guess about numbering.
Male bees are haploid and have 16 chromosomes so we chose the 16th during one of the two most mystical months of the year. Sorry females, as diploid you have 32, and there are no months with 32 days. And bees are generally not scary, Mylan fomenting panic that every child will go into anaphylactic shock and die without an overpriced EpiPen in every business aside (which they also do about Thanksgiving, and every other month.)
This is my t-shirt, but not our t-shirt. Ours will be more science-y than this or the various cancer shirts out there.
Bees dying are a "boo!" tactic. Honeybees feeding all but a tiny fraction of a percent are also a "boo!" tactic. Bees deserve better than they get from our modern activist culture, so next year we will have events, t-shirts, articles and more about the positive aspects of bee-ing scientific when it comes to our pollinating friends.
