BRITAIN’S bees are to be privatised in a bid to reverse their decline.
The insects have been hit in recent years by a huge drop in productivity, mass redundancies, and the collapse of traditional honeymaking communities, and the move is aimed at getting the ailing bee industry back on track.
Beehives will be rebranded as ‘Apiary Solutions’ and the bees will get a new uniform of regulation grey, updating the traditional yellow and black outfits that bees have worn since the 1950s.
They will also be assessed on aspects of their performance by a new regulatory body, Ofswarm.
Nathan Muir, director of free market think tank Urethra, said: “The traditional neighbourhood bee – buzzing about, collecting honey, occasionally stinging people who threaten the hive, maintaining a crucial balance between plants and animals in a precarious ecosystem – is a hopelessly outdated relic.
“For instance, the idea of a lone bee collecting pollen is absurd. Privatisation will allow us to to glue three or four bees together into one ‘megabee’ that will collect five times the amount of pollen of a 20th Century bee.”
He added: “Privatisation has trasformed so many organisations that barely worked to organisations that are very good at pretending they do.
“The problem with the natural world is, and always has been, that it doesn’t grasp the importance of free markets. Bees are just the start.”
A bee spokesman said ‘bzzzz’ before doing a sad little dance.
