Bees Real and Virtual

I was so happy to see honeybees Sunday and yesterday.  So happy that I didn't mind when one ran right into me, busily fertilizing a mint flower, as I walked past the plant on my walk around the neighborhood.

I've read the stories about honeybee decline (I'm not linking to a "what you may think" site, by the way) and have seen it at my house.  Even a couple of years ago I would risk stinging by trying to cut flowers off my rhododendron.  Now, hardly any bees gather in June when it blooms.

But Sunday, the sunflowers in our garden were loaded, which made cutting an adventure.  That is good news.  (and, please, do read the link.  I love the Freakanomics people even if some of their observations don't quite jive with mine-but I love outside-the-box-thinking.)

But now, bees have been disappearing online.

Huh?  The Internet has bees?

Sure it does.  How do you think blogs get fertilized to make little baby blogs?  Oops, bad joke.  Bad, bad joke.  No, that's not it.

You guessed it-I'm about ready to make another FarmVille posting.  This time, it's about bees and glitches.  Sure 'nough, the geniuses at Zynga decided our farms needed bees to pollinate the crops.  So we were all given beehives to build.  Had to get materials from our neighbors, a total of 50.  Then, after the beehives were done, we had to find a queen bee, meaning we had to plant certain crops where they hung around.  I'm glad I found mine in a couple of days.  After that, I was able to start adding bees.  Thank you, FarmVille neighbors, for sending them.

Then the bees started to disappear. 

Nearly every day (and I do play every day when I'm not out of town) I got a message saying I hadn't tended my beehive and a bee had flown away.  Maybe they are hard at work on my sunflowers and neighborhood mint, but I don't think so.

Big surprise, it's a glitch.  Zynga is hard at work resolving the glitch but I don't think I've gotten my bees back.  I'm not crying-yet.

But, as detective Adrian Monk would say, "here's the thing."

Somehow I didn't catch anything about bees disappearing if you didn't tend the hives daily in the announcements.  I wouldn't have wasted time building hives.  Some of us have lives, Zynga, including people who caretake elderly parents, or other sick relatives.  Some of us travel for business and it's a bit exhausting keeping up with the farm.  Some of them don't play daily due to religious reasons. (one of my FarmVille neighbors is such a person and he would never dream of playing on the Sabbath or various other occasions.)  And...well the list goes on.

You really should have disclosed that before people started to build.  I follow a major FarmVille blog (I suppose that means I don't have a life) and never saw this fact.  So these people are going to have to chase around for their bees.  Why?  Why? 

How about turning this off permanently, FarmVille?  And, once again, PLEASE, please fix your glitches before introducing more stuff?  Or, one day, you might just get....stung.