You may remember that a while back there was quite a stir about huge numbers of bees absconding from their hives and vanishing. Well, I’ve determined conclusively where they’ve all gone and why. Today I was eating lunch with a coworker at a sandwich shop, and as I was polishing off the last corner of my sandwich, a horde of bees descended on my plate and started picking over the bits and pieces of sandwich that were still there. I watched intently as one of the bees systematically dug into a slice of turkey and, after about ten seconds of hewing at it, lifted off again clinging to a chunk of deli turkey approximately ten times the size of its thorax and darted away without so much as a tip of the hat. I felt injured by this blatant disregard for my personal property, but more stunning by far was the strangeness of the bee’s dietary habits. What would a bee want with enough turkey for the beehive equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner? Don’t bees feed on the nectar in flowers?

My conclusion is this: bees are slowly developing intelligence. Remember, these are the creatures that communicate the locations of food sources to the rest of the hive by a dance that involves some kind of six-dimensional geometry. Well, now they’ve discovered that flowers are not the only places to get their three meals a day, and they’re fed up with this bothersome business of making honey for hungry humans. If we don’t watch out, we’ll soon find ourselves trapped between glass panels or in wire cages producing cell phones and MP3 players for swarms of gadget-crazed, intelligent bees.