Remember that story about the honeybees dying off?  Not so much…

…even the original report describing and naming the phenomenon explicitly says it’s something that has been seen before (repeatedly), named before, and studied before – in all cases without coming to any conclusion about the cause. The researchers didn’t like the older names for the syndrome (which usually included the word "disease," which has connotations about infectiousness that don’t seem applicable here), so they renamed it colony collapse disorder. That point has largely eluded the press, with the result that most people think this is a new phenomenon, when in fact the researchers who described it note reports of similar die-offs dating back to the 1890s.

So…If they call it a surge instead of an escalation, it’s really a different thing…right?  But then it’s really hard sometimes to completely grasp what people are telling us, even when they’re telling it to us straight…

At least once in the present case the media got something completely wrong and created a huge mess: The story about cell phones was basically a misrepresentation of what one pair of reporters wrote about a study that they misinterpreted. In a nutshell, the original research didn’t involve cell phones, and the researchers never said their research was related to honey bee colony die-offs.

Can we work in a quote from someone famous?  Someone everyone trusts? 

Even details like the alleged Einstein quote are dubious. No one has yet found proof that Einstein said anything about bees dying off – the earliest documented appearance of the "quote" is 1994 and, yes, Albert was dead at the time.

Here’s one version of the Einstein quote making the rounds…

"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination …no more men!"

Snopes has more…(Just be sure to turn off Javascript before you visit them).  The quote apparently first popped up in news stories about a beekeeper protest in Brussels in 1994, where they were distributing pamphlets with the quote on it.  I can’t find anything more on the specific nature of the protest, so I don’t even know if they were protesting to draw attention to bee die-offs or for a pay raise or what.  But apparently the quote has just been mindlessly recycled for news stories about colony collapse disorder.  Never let a good quote go to waste I guess, even if it’s completely bogus.

I’m starting to wonder now if the news media here in America was always this bad, and we just never noticed it before the Internet allowed the rest of us to compare notes behind their backs.