THERE is definitely more to learning about the ‘birds and bees’ than its conventional connotation. Though our unbridled population growth demands some learning and ‘unlearning’ on that count as well, that is a digression. Let us stick to the unconventional here.

The guy was dangling some 15 metres above the ground and would have jumped up and down had the harness holding him aloft allowed such exuberant display. Instead, a jubilant shout of “the queen’s laying”, was all that his precarious perch allowed by way of celebration, according to a Dawn report titled ‘Rare wild bees find has English country estate buzzing’. The scientist was celebrating his find in 2021 of a rare ecotype species of bees in the Oxford countryside with a suspected centuries-old lineage.

So what? Many would be tempted to say. Why should we care about some bees being found halfway across the world? Well, because we live in the same world where environmental degradation hits us in the face every day of our lives and it impacts the flora and fauna equally, if not more. There was a time when ‘fog’ was specific to Lahore. Flight schedules and road travel would get affected, but who cared? It was a Lahore problem. Then smog spread everywhere and now even Karachi is getting a taste of it. Climate change is an issue that impacts us all and having established that it is the develo­p­­ed world that has contributed much more to it and continues to add to the worsening global warming, we need to do our bit to stop the downward spiral; we cannot cut our nose to spite the ‘other’s’ face.

Pakistan never had sufficient green cover — remember we are a desert with the Indus running across it — and reckless deforestation has destroyed the re­­m­aining natural habitat of wildlife including the bees that form a crucial link in the ecosystem we share with countless creatures. Bee farming caught on in Pakistan as the only alternative to the natural production of honey, providing small-scale livelihood to rural families.

What’s the big deal if we run out of bees and honey?

As if the climatic conditions were not enough to wreak havoc on the feeding grounds of bees, Covid-19 struck. Yes! It did impact bee farming in a big way. The lockdowns and ban on inter-city transport meant that essential medicine for the bees in captivity could not reach the farms. This resulted in the deaths of millions of bees and a drastic reduction in honey production. Bee framers in KP suffered losses running into hundreds of millions of rupees, owing to Covid-related hardships.

Again, some may ask ‘What’s the big deal if we one day run out of bees and honey? We have sugar and maple syrup and whatnot.” One may not care about the bees — but at immense peril to us and the environment we inhabit. In addition to the fact that what is bad for them is bad for us too, plus their crucial role in pollination, what about the bee farmers? Do we not care about them? If the presence of alternative sources is any logic for this ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude, what about solar and wind energy? Should we now stop caring about hydropower? Most of us have never and will never eat any part of a whale or a shark, at least knowingly. Does that mean we should not worry about their extinction because we have rahu and surmaee to satisfy our yearning for seafood?

Qand and shakar (forms of sugar) do appear as alternatives for ‘sweet’ in literature, especially poetry. However, imagine having honey only as a metaphor like the phoenix or the unicorn, and losing it in all its tangible beauty and sweetness. What a shame and what a loss it will be to both the palate and literary realms. A casual web search for poetry containing the word ‘honey’ throws up such a humongous body of work that it could form a tome spread over volumes.

Till about the 1970s, the famous Royal Gurkha Rifles were deployed in Britain to prevent poachers from stealing red eagle eggs from their nests. They now pass on their reconnaissance and stealth skills to the staff of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to do its own patrolling of rare birds’ nests.

Our national contribution to the field of science and technology, including research and conservation, is next to zero. All we can do is parrot the great feats achieved in the past by the learned Arab men. Not that there were no illustrious women, but we choose to ignore them and cannot name even a couple off the cuff. All we have under the label ‘scientist’ are lobbyists and wannabe public intellectuals without any patent or a theory proving or disproving anything in their field of specialisation. Hope the message does not just ‘float like a butterfly’ and does ‘sting like a bee’. After all, we are trying to create some buzz about the bees.

The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.
shahzadsharjeel1@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, October 16th, 2023