Editorial: Biosecurity and bees

Abstract

It is often the case that a weak argument is artificially bolstered by a quotation attributed to a famous person, gaining attention, authority, and verisimilitude. Thus the statement "If the bee disappears from the face of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination ...no more me" has, in many newspaper articles and popular magazines, been attributed to Albert Einstein. Apart from the fact that Einstein was a physicist, and not a biologist, the earliest use of this phrase seems to have been in 1984, almost thirty years after the famous man died. However, in recent years this quotation has begun to reappear, in the light of the still unexplained phenomenon of extensive bee deaths in Europe and the United States. This phenomenon, termed 'colony collapse disorder' (CCD) has been added to the apocalyptic visions so popular in the mass media.