I think bees are amazing. Sure it sucks to get stung by one, but I don't think I have been stung for more than 30 years --- not since I was a little kid. Wasps are a bit frightening, but honey bees, bumble bees, and the really amazing huge carpenter bees are almost no threat at all, and I will go out of my way to get right up as close as possible and watch them do their amazing work. Check it out sometime -- they are cool.

Bees are defintely on the decline. Just a few yeas ago I used to get TONS of honey bees in the garden --- going about their business, polinating tomatoes and other stuff. And we used to get plenty of the solitary native bumble bees too. A couple of years ago, the honey beees started to drop off, and the bumble bees seemed to increase. Then this year there were hardly any bees of either kind. Maybe that is why I didn't get any tomatoes until about August, when I usually get them several MONTHS earlier. Or maybe it was the weather.

People are so disconnected from where their food comes from these days, that they have no idea the things that affect them personally, such as bees. If the bees disappeared tomorrow, a lot of people would starve within a year --- like millions or billions of people would starve. Saying you hate bees because you got stung once, is like saying you hate the sun because of a sunburn you got when you were a kid. Without it, you would die, so get over it.

No doubt, this guy with the "bee-bee-que" had a dangerous situation with a full fucking swarm of that size living in his barbeque. If he had just pulled that cover off, he would have been in some shit. But the best thing to do would have been to call a beekeeper. They may charge a small fee, or they may come get the bees for free, but it is worthwhile to save the swarm. American farmers pay billions of dollars every year to have beekeepers bring pollinator bees to their crops. But for some unknown reason, there has been a massive die-off over the past few years, and there are not enough bees to do the work. A healthy wild swarm like this one is valuable because it may be geneticaly resistant to whatever is killing off the commercial hives. If you run across a wild swarm, let a beekeeper know, and do NOT bug bomb it!