By Mark Oshinskie
Dispatches from a Scamdemic
November 13, 2025
In latter day America, "amazing" is overused. For example, while I like ice cream, I wouldn't call even the best ice cream "amazing."
But the conduct and teamwork of hive bees is amazing. Honeybees fly up to four miles to obtain forage/food. Given bees' smallness in relation to humans, that might be like a human walking 500 miles for a meal. Of course, some humans drive cars absurdly long distances for a restaurant dinner. Many who do feel compelled to describe the meal as "amazing."
Bees that fly miles for food are understandably fatigued when they return to their hives. Therefore, they inform their hive mates where the good food is by flying up and down, around in a circle, forward and backward and to the left and right, using the sun as a navigational reference point. Duly notified, the signaled bees set out for their target. While bees are motivated by their search for nectar, all of this sophisticated bee activity benefits people. Bees pollinate 70% of human food plant species.
When I managed community gardens in New Brunswick, New Jersey, we kept bee hives. There and elsewhere, boxes holding various hives were placed near each other. Each bee belonged to a specific stack of boxes. If a bee born in an adjacent hive tried to enter a hive where it doesn't belong, a bouncer bee sensed this unwelcome presence and bumped the invader away from the entrance. Given that there are over 10,000 honeybees in one hive and they all seem to look alike, such a security system is also amazing.
Honey making is a volume business. While a hive can yield 50 pounds of honey annually, the average bee produces only one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey during its six-week life. Each hive's honey has a distinctive scent and flavor based on the types of forage its bees eat. Hence, honey can taste like clover, buckwheat, blueberries or other flowering plants.
Bees did fine before humans built hives. Man-made hives seem mostly a way for humans to exploit bee labor. I painted a smiling "Winnie the Pooh" on one of the boxes eating from a jar of honey. I put a speech bubble above him saying, "I work for DISNEY (they own the rights to Pooh) and I'm here to STEAL all your HONEY!"
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Bees are a forward-looking species. Unless humans harvest/steal it, bees create honey to feed following generations. Humans should have emulated bees during Coronamania, prioritizing the well-being of younger generations over the survival of those who had already lived a long time. Though I'm well above the median age, I hated seeing the young forced to forfeit so much vital time and so many experiences, ostensibly on behalf of their elders, the supermajority of whom predictably survived a badly overhyped microbe. By failing to observe, speak and vote against the social and economic damage done to the young, many of my same-age peers allowed this to happen. So did many of the young foolishly, fearfully tolerate their own confinement. Many old and young even supported this destructive lunacy. Most still show no remorse. I'll never again trust or respect these people.
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Handling bee frames is quietly exciting and memorable. I've done it many times. When I began working around hives, I knew almost nothing about bees. I was guided by a guy in his late forties named Javier. After falling out of a tree in Puerto Rico as a nine-year-old, Javier lost the use of his legs and had limited use of his arms and hands. He uses a motorized wheelchair. He could neither open the hives nor handle the frames when I pulled these out.
Javier relied on others to drive him around in a van that contained an electric lift. Javier's cousin, Phil, often drove the van. Bees scared Phil. He stayed at least twenty feet away from them. But like bees in a hive, we three had complementary roles. Phil could drive Javier, Javier could teach me, and I could open the hive boxes and handle the frames inside of the boxes.
Bee frames in hives resemble hanging files in office drawers. The one foot by two feet frames are filled with thousands of hexagonal cells holding honey or eggs. Hundreds of bees crawl across both sides of each frame.
We inspected each if the eight frames in each of the three or four stacked boxes to monitor the hives' vitality. Roughly how many bees were there? Was the queen laying enough eggs? Was the hive infested by mites? How much honey was there; was there so much that it was time to add another box to our stacks? Though some say you should seldom open hives, we did so more often because Javier liked to see and hear the hives' inner workings.
The first time I handled the frames, Javier told me that bees detect human fear, manifested by a hive tender's sudden motion and even by the hormonal scents in the handler's sweat. Generally, if the hive inspector stays calm, so will the honeybees.
Opening a hive doesn't usually set off a frenzy. But on the hottest days, or if one jars the hive box when prying off the box's lid that the bees had sealed tightly by secreting propolis, the bees buzz loudly and exhibit more motion and aggression.
Occasionally, I got stung, sometimes by two or three bees at once. Bees didn't like being trapped inside my shirt. When they were, they stung me. It smarted but usually for only a half hour. One day, a bee flew into my open mouth and stung the inside of my cheek. The side of my face swelled like a boxer's and ached all afternoon. This wasn't enough to deter me from handling the bees. There are things that hurt much more than bee stings do. It was interesting to see the bees. Doing to made me think about human societies.
Many people irrationally fear bees. Only about 1% of Americans are allergic to bee venom, most of them mildly so. And honeybees venom is less potent than that of hornets, yellow jackets, wasps or Africanized bees. Each year, 72 of 340,000,000 Americans die from bee or wasp stings. That's one for every 4.5 million Americans, i.e., about one person in a dozen Woodstocks. Rational grown-ups should like their odds of bee sting survival. Just as they should have liked their Covid survival odds.
When I mentioned to gardeners or visitors that we had bee hives in the corner of the site and asked if they wanted to see them, most expressed fear and loathing and declined my invitation. If they see even one bee, many people either run or douse it with Raid and beat it to a pulp with a fly swatter. Yet, like the Covid response, zero tolerance for bees is both unrealistic and destructive. People don't know or care about bees' ecological importance.
Arrogant human exercises of dominion over nature often cause harm. Due largely to the use of insecticides known as neonicotinoids to eliminate other insects, bee populations have dropped sharply over the past twenty years. As have efforts to eliminate bees, efforts to eradicate viruses have deeply damaged physical, social and economic processes that sustain humanity. Humans have been more dysfunctionally effective at killing off bees and other beneficial insects than they could ever be at eliminating viruses.
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To avoid stings, many bee handlers wear full bee suits. But full suits are uncomfortable on hot days. And part of beekeeping is being bold enough to work with minimal protection. They sell t-shirts that say, "This is my bee suit" and some beekeepers pose for photos wearing ZZ Top-esque "bee beards" hanging from their chins. After the first time I handled bee frames, I stopped wearing a suit. I soon switched from a long sleeve t-shirt to a short one. Then I ditched the screened beekeeper's hood and wore a baseball hat, along with a short-sleeved t-shirt and shorts.
Before opening the hives, we routinely took dried pine needles and put them into a quart sized, hand-held smoker device, set the needles on fire and, by squeezing the bellows, blew smoke through the device's conical top immediately after opening the hive. Smoke immediately subdues bees. They move much more slowly. It's amusing to witness this swift, mass stupefaction.
One hot morning, Javier, Phil and I were inspecting frames. As usual, I approached the hives from their back side and pried open the top. I pulled out one frame at a time and held each one up for Javier to view from his chair six feet away. After examining each frame for a minute or so, he commented on its appearance and I returned it frame to the hive box. Wary Phil stood three times as far away.
While this process was occurring, dozens of bees typically landed and walked on each of my naked forearms and sometimes on my face and legs. As usual, the bees seemed calm enough. So was I.
Then I felt a bee crawling under, and deeper into, my loose shorts. She inched up the inside of my left thigh.
I usually wear undershorts. But by coincidence, that morning, I wasn't. Going commando left an unobstructed path to my male parts. The frisky insect was walking a beeline toward Ground Zero.
I immediately reminded myself of Javier's advice: don't feel fear, don't show fear. But I wondered that, if a bee sting in the eye can blind a person, could a bee sting in my parts unknown cause a similarly disabling effect? At a minimum, I suspected a nether region sting would hurt even more than one on my inner cheek. I imagined multi-hour swelling, such as Viagra ads warn of. I didn't think I would enjoy this. Would I have to apply ice all afternoon?
Keeping the frame held up to chest level, I calmly told Javier, "Javi, there's a bee moving up my left leg toward my crotch."
Sensing my peril, and in a sign of male empathy and solidarity, Javier called out in his always-raspy voice, "Smoke 'em, Phil! Smoke 'em!"
Phil suppressed his bee fear and scampered toward me with the smoke maker. He put its pointed nose under the edge of my shorts and squeezed the two sides of the device together, delivering a solid smoky hit right on target. It was as clutch a performance as I had ever seen. As they say in basketball: a buzzer beater.
The bee immediately retreated on foot, moved out from under the hemline and took flight.
Whew! Smoke is amazing.
As did Javier and many other boys, I used to climb trees in my youth. Where I lived it was part of growing up. Sometimes it could be a little scary. But I continued, both in order to be adventurous and to be one of the gang. Tree climbing resembled bee handling in both of those ways. The desire to belong isn't intrinsically harmful. Sometimes it causes you to do things that you find out you like.
Javier's injury was life-alteringly awful. But that doesn't mean that kids shouldn't climb trees. They need to hang out with other kids, have fun, opt for the randomness of nature over a structured environment and confront at least some measure of danger. Rarely, doing so can yield a terrible outcome. But on a society-wide basis, the rewards of youthful risk-taking far outweigh the risks. Timid children seem likely to become irrationally fearful adults, leading easily tormented lives.
Alongside the Scamdemic's intergenerational theft, the thing that bothered me most about the Covid response was that, while many knew the lockdowns, closures, masks, tests and shots were a Scam and opportunistically went along, many actually, albeit very naively, feared a respiratory virus. Their insistence that others share their fear profoundly disgusted me throughout. A risk-free life is dull and unrealistic. Trying to eliminate or avoid all risks creates more problems than it solves. No matter what you do to avoid risk, some consequence of avoiding harm will likely present itself to you.
At one point during the Scamdemic, I saw a post that resonated deeply It said, "We are not descended from weak, fearful people."
All of the generations that preceded ours were much tougher than billions of the Coronamanic were during the Scamdemic. Our predecessors had to be, in order to survive. They overcame physical challenges infinitely more serious than those presented by a respiratory virus that threatened only a tiny fraction of the old and sick, if it threatened anyone at all. Our ancestors were chronically, often fatally, hungry, cold or hot. They frequently faced pain or violence.
Even in peacetime, they did arduous, dangerous work just to feed themselves and their families. My grandfather daily went daily into a deep coal mine full of lung-clogging-airborne coal particles, with tunnels that sometimes collapsed and buried his co-workers alive. He trained mules by hitting them with a 2 x 4 across the nose; an angry mule can kill badly injure or kill a man. My 23-year-old uncle was shot down and killed in a spy plane over Soviet Armenia. For nearly forty years my father worked 70 hours a week in a rough, physically risky auto assembly plan, mostly on night shifts. I worked as a roofer, though only for one summer; every day, two or three stories above the ground, one false step from a disabling injury.
Whether you know details or not, most of your ancestors endured challenging, brutal conditions. I've read some books about American prairie settlers enduring freezing cold, scorching heat and constant wind and inhabiting sod houses shared by snakes and rodents. While in Manhattan last night, I looked at the many 1880s-1930s buildings there and recalled a book I read in August that told of the many demolition and construction laborers who fell from lethal heights or were killed by falling objects, blasts or, while building bridges and tunnels, by the bends. For those killed or maimed in these settings, there was little charitable relief, no life insurance nor any government safety net to rely on. Their contemporaries made no documentary films about their suffering or death. Many of our ancestors died as infants. Relatively few of our pre-Twentieth Century predecessors reached 60, much less 79.5, the median age of those officially, though not actually, killed by The Virus in a society where the average person dies at 78.5.
Americans and other anglophones live in the softest places on Earth at the softest time in human history. Prior generations would either be disgusted or laugh derisively that so many of their descendants cowered in fear of a virus with a 99.997% survival rate. Most members of Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation died years before 2020. Their descendants, many of whom supported the Covid lockdowns, are members of The Worst Generation, showed themselves to have extremely unrealistic expectations about the human life span and to be unbelievably, pathetically gullible and psychologically weak.
The Coronamaniacs failed to see the massive destruction caused by such irrational fear. Avoiding risk created its own existential threats. People got bored, depressed, addicted, broadly passive and out of shape. Collectively, they lost trillions of dollars of wealth to inflation. By itself, this latter effect will worsen and shorten many lives. Thinking they're protecting themselves, they take prescribed pills and shots like the Covid "vaccines" that harm them and shorten their lives.
Weak bee hives fail during cold winters. Given the widespread foolishness and mental frailty displayed during Coronamania, the human hive faces a similarly dim future.