A 'stinging' Doomsday scenario

When I was ten years old, I read a sci-fi book with a plot somewhere along these lines: Aliens wanted kill mankind and claim Earth for their own purposes. But these weren't the kinds of aliens that showed up in giant spaceships and just start wreaking havoc and destruction in order to achieve that goal. No, these aliens were smart, stealthy aliens.

Instead, they worked undercover, observing humanity and the overall planet's ecosystem until they came up with a single weakness which if exploited, like the unshielded thermal exhaust port on the Death Star, could cause a chain reaction leading to humanity's annihilation. (Yeah, I was a geeky kid...)

The weakness that they found? Bumblebees.

Albert Einstein once said "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left." Bees pollinate about one-third of humanity's food supply. Without them, we would have some serious food shortage problems.

Not only that, but bees are such a crucial chain in the food supply's of other animals, it could cause widespread species devastation:

Which is why the recent news about bees is so alarming.

• In the UK, an unseasonably warm February has led many bees to come out of their winter hibernation too early for the first time in recorded history. Their food supplies are not widely available yet, and experts worry they will be killed off by March frosts.
• The largest US beekeeper has recently been hit by Colony Collapse Disorder: a little-understood phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive abruptly disappear. No one knows why. Climate change is one theory.

It's another example of the subtle ways in which climate change can have a big impact on the way we live today.