Melittosphex burmensis
This morning I googled “list of extinct bees” because I have been interested in fossils lately, particularly of ancient bees. In the list of suggested search words at the bottom of my google results was “bees endangered snopes”.
Now, Snopes is a website where you go and double check whether something you’ve read on the internet is true or not. Whether a particular news article is a scam etc. I don’t know why I was surprised but it struck me as odd that people might think the current plight of the bees is an internet scam. It shouldn’t have surprised me.
The prefix “post–“ has been on my mind lately thanks to The Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2016, post-truth. We use that prefix a lot in the academy … post-structuralism, postcolonial, postmodern …
After something.
Post-war, post-truth, post-apocalyptic, post-bees?
The thought that there are (quite likely) people out there thinking … I just bet you that whole endangered bees thing is just another internet scam … strikes me as ridiculous and funny. Sad and terrifying, yes. But people are still people. Human nature is what it is. there is something comforting about it because it means we don’t quite yet live in a post-human world. Well, not post-human yet.
That happens after post-bees …