When the congressional enablers of the Big Three automakers proposed a bailout for Detroit, I got to thinking about a friend of mine.

He took pity on a female acquaintance with a somewhat chaotic lifestyle and loaned her $200. I told him that he would never see that $200 again.

I was right.

Call me cynical, but I am not sanguine about handing over large gobs of public money to manufacturers with a rotten business model that has exacerbated U.S. dependence on a fossil fuel supplied by assorted crooks, cartels, and despots.

Call me someone who dwells on the past, but it’s difficult to forget that Detroit and its unions spent years stonewalling and stomping on reasonable legislation to boost fuel economy standards – until public outrage at high gasoline prices in 2007 finally shouted down the Big Three and their can’t-do culture of complaining.

Call me hard-hearted, but when companies are run into the ground by sclerotic executive bureaucracies that failed to anticipate oil price risks, failed to fix their product development systems, failed to sharpen their brands, and failed to bargain hard enough over labor costs, they deserve to die. ...

This has nothing to do with CCD, but everything to do with the beekeeping life. If you want a serious, and pretty straight forward summary of what CCD is doing at the moment, where it has been and where it may be going (and don’t want to click through the past dozen or so articles that have been here and covered most of this already, click on this link Penn State link and disregard the rest of this article. The author has talked to almost all of the right people and tells a pretty good story. It’s thoughtful, sensitive and matter-of-fact. There’s nothing new because there’s nothing new at the moment, but it does fill lots of space ... all three parts of it. It deserves a place in the archives here somewhere.

But here’s the thing. Beekeepers, for the most part, are pretty much unaware of CCD. Depending on where they are right now, they’re finishing up this season’s work with the bees by feeding or moving to winter grounds, getting ready for winter where they are, moving to California for almond pollination, harvesting and processing the last of the honey crop for the year, marketing what they’ve harvested, finding pollination contracts to prepare for next spring, fixing or building equipment, making more honey far in the south, or simply taking it easy, finally.

But I don’t want to talk about any of that, either. Here’s one of the best things about being a beekeeper ... not the best maybe, but certainly one of the best. Honey.

I have to travel quite a bit for my job. That gets old sometimes what with the hassles of air travel anymore, but those annoyances are far outweighed by the good people I get to visit with when I arrive. I go to beekeeping meetings, visit beekeeping operations to cover stories or current news, or set up shop and sell the books we publish. I’ve been fortunate in that regard and have met hundreds, probably thousands of beekeepers over the years. And I collect the honey they produce. Right now I have 17 different kinds of honey sitting on my kitchen table, ready to eat. I have honey from Arizona, Oregon, Ohio, Florida. Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and some places I can’t remember.

And the honey in Arizona is not the same by any stretch as the honey from Wisconsin, Florida, Maine, Oregon or South Dakota. And this is what I want to share with you ... the great hidden secret of artisan and varietal honeys. ...

Is this for real?

There is, perhaps justifiably, some amount of skepticism concerning the actual reality of Colony Collapse Disorder in the beekeeping world. That skepticism extends to much of the world for that matter. True, lots of bees have died in the past couple of years both in the U.S. and around the globe. But identifiable things keep coming up to explain (some, most, all – take your pick) of those deaths.

For instance, the recent flap in the U.K., where beekeepers marched on 10 Downing Street and Parliament demanding more money for bee research and firing off their smokers is one good example. They admitted, quietly, that the bees that died and the honey crop that didn’t materialize there last season were mostly victims of poor weather.

Huge bee losses recently in France are suspected to be due to misapplied pesticides, and significant colony losses in Spain are being blamed on that new Nosema disease that’s not so new any more.

Even here in the states, some beekeepers can quite clearly point to something explainable causing their colony losses ... even when those losses are large and have not been seen in such portions previously.

But at the same time, some of these losses are not explainable and there seems no reason they should occur. Even after samples have been examined and a multitude of sins are exposed, these sins alone do not explain the evacuation of adult bees from hundreds, sometimes thousands of colonies in an operation.

If this were the first time this or a similar set of circumstances had occurred perhaps we would have a different perspective. Sadly, it is not. ...

First, a hearty congratulations to President-elect Obama. With a compelling life story, a strong message, and a superb ground game, he seized a moment in history. And, he gave us Republicans a thorough pasting. In many ways, we deserved it.

Already, the fight for the party's soul is on. The hard right has already begun plotting a campaign to push the party further to the margins of the spectrum. Those of us on the center-right had better fight back.

Because, as Margaret Thatcher once said, politics is like an airplane. The right and left wings may provide lift, but the middle is where the brains are. Alas, ...