MagicThought

The following article on pubic hair removal was sent to me by a former student who has been reading our blog. (Thanks Alexis!!) This trend is quite interesting in the context of our class, given the links suggested with circumcision, and it will get even more interesting when we get to Mesopotamia, cuneiform, and the initial transition of humans from the Imaginary to the Symbolic.

Of particular interest is the following rather astonishing paragraph:

But then around the mid-90s some mysterious memo went out to twentysomething women that it was no longer sufficient to tidy the “bikini line” so it didn’t cascade down the inner thigh like a spider plant.

In the previous paragraph the article actually refers to female pubic hair as “the ladygarden.” And then we have a reference to “spider plants,” all of which takes us back to the notion of “Hybris,” which is the subject of two previous posts. Also notice that all of this begins to happen in the mid-90s, a decade after the mass market introduction of the personal computer, and right at the moment that the Internet is going mass market. What about that “mysterious memo,” normally a written document that gets circulated. Who wrote it and cirulated it? “Mysterious memo”…. sounds like the cultural unconscious to me. Notice also that it features Christopher Hitchens, whose current popular book is titled, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” So the guy who is challenging the paternal authority of God has gotten himself a good wax job. Wax, of course, has played a big role in the history of paternity and writing technologies. It was used for seals, as Hamlet demonstrates, and it was used for wax codexes back in the early years of Christianity. Of course, the moon, which is the basis of the oldest known writing, a lunar calender designed to track a woman’s menstrual cycle, waxes. And wax, as you might recall, comes from Bees.

Notice that in addition to getting a new body-do, he got a teeth job as well: “(he also traded fag-stained British hat-pegs for twinkly Hollywood gnashers)”

But what is really fascinating and tragic, is how this discussion is framed in the context of Islam and the Iraq War, which is of course being fought where once Mesopotamia was.

When the Bikini Line Became a Battle Line
Janice turner

Christopher Hitchens, hammer of Islamism, rationalist supernova, has just had a “back, sack and crack wax”. Here he is in December’s Vanity Fair, pudgy hands clasped in unlikely prayer pose, while a cadre of beauticians yank swatches of what seems to be shag-pile from the nethermost Pelt of the Hitch. Antiwar types might relish his agonised depilation diary — “like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper handjob” — and wonder if it might afford him some deeper insight into activities inside Guantanamo.

Yet, strangely, in submitting to this ritual for a feature on self-improvement to celebrate his recently acquired US citizenship (he also traded fag-stained British hat-pegs for twinkly Hollywood gnashers) Hitchens has stepped into a rare place where Islam and Western consumerism concurs. For both agree that body hair, in its lush, natural form, is gross and repellent, a problem that must be eradicated at all costs.

While Hitchens was merely emulating male models, gay men and footballers like David Beckham, who have championed the modern aesthetic of a smoother male torso, he was also echoing the religious rites of the 9/11 bombers, who reportedly shaved chest and pubic hair the night before their missions, to render their bodies pure and cleansed for when they pitch up in Paradise.

It is hard not to frown at the contradictions in both reasonings in reaching for the razor. Is Islam suggesting that the human form, created by God, must be perfected by Man, assisted by the Gillette Mach 3? Why in the West is the pubic bush, the most luxuriant manifestation of our sexual hormones, now universally condemned as “unsexy”?

According to some Islamic teaching both men and women are obliged to shave their pubic hair. In men it is part of the fitrah, the cleansing rituals, which also include circumcision, cutting nails and armpit hair, and trimming the moustache. And one can only reflect that males of all faiths (and none) would benefit from such a tough toilette to-do list from an early age, particularly those living in hotter climates. But Muslim women too are enjoined to be hairless, particularly preceding their weddings, and often to remain extensively manicured afterwards for reasons of cleanliness and purity.

Yet in the West such hairlessness in women denotes the inverse: in fact, a hot-hot-hot impurity, a 24/7 readiness for all-night dirty bedroom action. Such is the strength of this assumption that, when a website specialising in sick war snaps by US servicemen posted a photograph of an Iraqi woman injured in an explosion, revealing her bare and shaven lower half, American posters commented that she must be a lapdancer or a whore.

It is hard in the West to recall that there was a brief moment when the ladygarden was left untended, and the female body celebrated and desired in its natural state. The actress Sienna Miller is now filming Hippy Hippy Shake, a movie about the Oz magazine trial, and photos have circulated of her naked, except for obligatory flowers in her hair. And yet for all the effortful re-creation of the Sixties, one glaring anachronism remains: the Hitler moustache of a Brazilian wax, which marks Miller out as a totally 21st-century girl. Perhaps Hair and Make-up couldn’t manage a merkin.

But then around the mid-90s some mysterious memo went out to twentysomething women that it was no longer sufficient to tidy the “bikini line” so it didn’t cascade down the inner thigh like a spider plant. The gyms of Britain were suddenly full of women waxed into weeny welcome mats, with all the stubble, bruises, pimpled hair follicles and burst blood vessels that accompany this excruciating sexifying of the sex.

Like a trend for comedy-size breast implants, inflatable lips, hair extensions, extreme nails and high street daywear revealing more tittage than a ten-quid hooker, waxing filtered down from the porn industry. Here defuzzing makes the action, as it were, easier to follow. And for male performers depilation adds the illusion of an extra inch. Maybe Hitchens had that in mind.

The aesthetics of porn reigns in an age when sex is so commodified that lapdancing is deemed “empowering”, prostitution glorified in TV drama, sex less concerned with pleasure than display. Young women have swallowed the idea that they must look so “hot” that men would pay to sleep with them: pity the poor cow so badly maintained that she’d have to give it away for free.

You don’t need to page Dr Freud to wonder how the craze for bare pudenda might be tied to some unsavory fetishisation of youth. And now the waxed look is supported by a massive industry — hair removal in Britain is worth £280 million a year.

But as Western women are slaves to the diktats of fashion and beauty industries, likewise Islam preoccupies itself with all matters of intimate grooming. In North London, Bushra Noah, a 19-year-old British-born Muslim, is suing a North London hair salon for refusing to employ her because she demanded to wear a headscarf at work. The young owner of Wedge argues it is part of a stylist’s job to showcase the salon’s creativity in her own funky do.

Would it feel comfortable, I wonder, to have your hair cut by someone who believes that merely sipping coffee in the salon, with your head publicly revealed, is immodest, even obscene? Why anyway would a devout Muslim want to cut women’s hair? There are endless scholarly writings interpreting the Koran’s position on this: some suggest that women’s hair should not be cut at all, or only if it reaches beyond the base of the spine, others that styles favoured by non-believers are banned — but all agree women’s hair should never be so short she might be mistaken for a man. So how could Ms Noah square her avowed faith with a client opting for a Britney?

But then she is not fighting to wear the headscarf out of religious faith. Like the West Yorkshire teaching assistant who demanded to obscure her face while teaching infant children, the veil is a cultural weapon. It is a statement of separation from — and declared opposition to — the secular society in which she was raised, which she expects wholly to accommodate her impossible wishes, while she herself will not budge an inch.

In our war of ideas, the body is a key battlefield, and hair, as Samson discovered, is power.

If you want to get a sense of just how revolutionary the invention of the codex was, and why it would have been so quickly embraced by the early followers of Christ, read the following NYT article. Notice that Women and children are traditionally NOT allowed to write a Torah. Also, notice that the Torah is considered a body, and must be buried eventually.
Dr.B.

November 12, 2007
Congregation Writes Torah, With Help From a Scribe

By GLENN COLLINS
Thousands of years old though it may be, the Torah began anew on a recent Sunday with Helen Margalith, 92 years old. She faced the congregation, then stared at the seeming immensity of a blank white sheet of unblemished parchment. A sofer, or scribe, sat by her side, holding a feather quill. She tentatively grasped it an inch above his hand.

“Hold it gently,” said the scribe, Neil H. Yerman, coaching her to write the first letter as they both held the quill. “Now down, toward me.” The ritually blessed black gall ink marked the page as she exerted pressure. “And again.”

It was done, then: the first letter of the Bible, Bet, in Hebrew. “Beautiful!” Mr. Yerman exclaimed. She beamed. Wild applause erupted from the 300 congregants who had gathered in witness.

Soon — after five other members of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue had also written letters — there appeared the six-letter Hebrew word often translated as “In the beginning”: the first word of the Torah.

Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of the synagogue, on West 68th Street in Manhattan, told the congregation that “our expectation is that every single one of us will participate in some way in drafting this Torah,” honoring the 613th and final commandment, in Deuteronomy, interpreted to mean that Jews must write a Torah.

The effort is rare in that Rabbi Hirsch hopes that as many as possible of the Reform temple’s 700 families — some 2,000 people, from children to the venerable Mrs. Margalith — will participate in the writing over the next year.

In a single stroke, those who join in the ambitious project are both honoring tradition and testing its bounds. Typically, the writing of a Torah has been left to a highly trained sofer, collaborating perhaps with a chosen few in the temple. For many centuries, the process has been a journey into an arcane and proscribed world of recondite rules and spiritual imperatives that are a mystery even to many devout Jews.

“We could just have hired a scribe to work on it in a studio, and present it to us, but that wouldn’t allow the community to participate in the values of Torah,” Rabbi Hirsch said.

William B. Helmreich, professor of sociology and Judaic studies at the City University Graduate Center in Manhattan, said, “It is unusual for an entire congregation to do that, though often people pay to have a letter or word inscribed.” Generally letters are left blank, or outlined, at the end of a new Torah. Honored persons, including donors, are helped by the scribe to fill them in.

The Torah scroll — which must be handwritten, and contains the books of Moses, the first five books of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Deuteronomy — is regarded by many not only as the word of God given to the Jewish people from Moses, but also as a living being, which is buried when it can no longer be used.

A new Torah must be copied letter by letter from a Torah template, called the Tikkun. There must be 304,805 letters, Mr. Yerman said, “not 304,806, or 304,804, and there can be no mistakes.”

For Orthodox Jews, allowing the congregation to participate in this way “would not be kosher, and would not have the sanctity of a Torah,” said Rabbi David L. Greenfield, founder of Vaad Mishmeret STaM, a rabbinical council in Brooklyn that has certified 7,000 scribes, including some 200 in New York City.

It is preferable that Torah writers not be children, women, or those who do not cover their heads or don’t honor the Sabbath, he said, adding, “A layman is not advised to touch it.”

But Prof. Lawrence H. Schiffman, chairman of the Hebrew and Judaic studies department at New York University, said that “from the point of view of the Free Synagogue, it would be a legitimate Torah.” He added, “They regard it as kosher, so to them it is.”

And Arthur Green, rector of the Hebrew College Rabbinical School in Newton, Mass., said that “the perfection of having everyone participate is a kind of perfection that shouldn’t be ignored.”

Controversy is nothing new for a synagogue legendary for the independence of its founder, Rabbi Stephen Wise, who created a new congregation free of what he considered the censorship of synagogue boards, set up a congress to compete with the dominant American Jewish Committee, and created a competitor to the premier Reform seminary, the Hebrew Union College. (Hebrew Union merged with Rabbi Wise’s seminary after he died in 1949.)

“As the Talmud said, you have to be like a reed in the water,” said the 48-year-old Rabbi Hirsch, “flexible enough to move with the times, but not so flexible that you wind up floating down the river.”

The new Torah is being written in celebration of the congregation’s centennial this year. “We totally reject the idea that this is not valid and wonderful,” said Roberta Karp, co-chairwoman of the synagogue’s Torah committee. “People are entitled to their opinions, but I would invite critics to come to a session, to see how carefully we are doing this.”

The writing is being supervised in the Stephen Wise sanctuary by Mr. Yerman, who has written Torahs for Reform congregations, some of which have encouraged lay participation.

Singing the letters to himself (“the commandment says write the song, not the Torah,” Mr. Yerman said), he inscribes letters using a pen made from a turkey feather that he has cut to a calligraphic point with a surgical scalpel. The blessed oak-gall ink flows brilliantly onto the prepared white calfskin (ritually clean goats, sheep or deer are also used).

“You write it with every aspect of your being,” Mr. Yerman said. “There must be a spiritual intention. It is an act of love, the love of God.”

Mr. Yerman, 59, describes himself as a liberal sofer, adding, “I am here to be a guide and educator.” A scribe for two decades after a career on Wall Street, he said he observed tradition in writing the Torah, and wears a skullcap and a tallit, or prayer shawl.

Before he helps congregants write the letters, “I like to have a conversation with them about Torah,” he said. When they hold the quill, “I am not writing it, I am only holding it steady,” he added. “If you move it in the wrong direction, I am holding it, so you are not moving it that way.”

There are hundreds of written and oral traditions that govern the writing of a Torah. It takes painstaking, maniacally precise labor to produce perfectly shaped letters and their minuscule embellishments of ascending and descending lines; the aim is to separate the letters by no more than a hair’s breadth.

Scrolls are reviewed for correctness by rabbis and students, and, increasingly, vetted with computer programs that use optical character recognition for spell-checking. Minor mistakes can be scraped and patched; major mistakes can require the rewriting of whole pages.

Mr. Yerman was also enlisted to inscribe a new Torah for Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in 1995, in which a few hundred of the synagogue’s several thousand congregants participated, according to Mark H. Heutlinger, the temple’s administrator. “We were criticized for having written an unkosher Torah, since women and children participated,” he said. “That is their feeling, and we are entitled to our feeling.”

Even if all 2,000 members of the Stephen Wise synagogue participate, Mr. Yerman will still write most of the letters himself. As he proceeds in the work, Mr. Yerman leaves the sacred names of God blank in the manuscript until he has a chance to visit a mikvah, or ritual bath, to cleanse himself before filling them in.

New Torahs can cost $18,000 to $70,000 and more. To pay for the project — which is expected to cost more than $100,000, including the scroll and the cost of a yearlong schedule of educational Torah programs — participants are asked to pay for the letter they write: $18 for children, and a minimum of $36 for adults.

Given the synagogue’s honored tradition of argumentativeness, Rabbi Hirsch said, “I am almost embarrassed to say that no one in the congregation is against it, that I’ve heard.”

From today’s New York Times. Life is not easy for male bees, it seems. I suspect that it was not much different for men prior to the advent of writing and literacy
Dr. B.

November 13, 2007
Basics
In Hollywood Hives, the Males Rule

By NATALIE ANGIER
In his new animated film, Jerry Seinfeld plays Barry B. Benson, a wisecracking, moony-eyed, charmingly petulant New York honeybee who doesn’t want to spend his days as a worker bee stuck on the honeymaking assembly line. “You know, Dad, the more I think about it,” Barry says, “maybe the honey field just isn’t right for me.” To which his father, a proud, lifelong “honey stirrer,” snaps: “And you were thinking of, what, making balloon animals? That’s a bad job for a guy with a stinger!”

Swell comeback, Pop, but your son has a point, starting with the posterior one he shouldn’t have in the first place. Isn’t Barry supposed to be a he bee? Well, male honeybees don’t have stingers, for the simple anatomical reason that a bee’s stinger is a modified version of an ovipositor, the distinctly feminine organ through which a female insect lays her eggs.

Barry is absolutely right, however, to doubt his fitness for the honey trade. In the real world, every job on a beehive’s spreadsheet — foraging for nectar and pollen, fanning nectar into honey, fawning over the queen, squirting out wax, battling off bears, tossing out the trash and dead bees — is performed by a cast of workers that is homogeneously female. Sterile, yes, with stingers where their egg-laying tubes should be, but female nonetheless.

By bowdlerizing the basic complexion of a great insect society, Mr. Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie” follows in the well-pheromoned path of Woody Allen as a whiny worker ant in “Antz” and Dave Foley playing a klutzy forager ant in “A Bug’s Life.” Maybe it’s silly to fault cartoons for biological inaccuracies when the insects are already talking like Chris Rock and wearing Phyllis Diller hats. But isn’t it bad enough that in Hollywood’s animated family fare about rats, clownfish, penguins, lions, hyenas and other relatively large animals, the overwhelming majority of characters are male, despite nature’s preferred sex ratio of roughly 50-50? Must even obligately female creatures like worker bees and soldier ants be given sex change surgery, too? Besides, there’s no need to go with the faux: the life of an authentic male social insect is thrilling, poignant and cartoonish enough.

“It’s a pity they tell so much nonsense,” said Bert Hölldobler of Arizona State University, one of the world’s leading ant authorities, “when real insect societies are so full of little dramas.”

For male ants and honeybees, time is brief, their numbers briefer, and the patience of their sisters briefest of all. In a honeybee colony of, say, 40,000 bees, only 200 — half a percent — will be male, while among ant species like the harvesters, males may account for 10 percent or 15 percent of the total. Paradoxically, males are made through the withholding of sperm, hatching from eggs that the queen lays but does not fertilize with any of her stored semen samples, as she will to generate female workers. To compound the paradox, these genetic oddballs, these haploid mama’s boys born of asexual, semen-free means, will mature into what are really great big packets of sperm on the wing.

This is not to make light of the masculine charge. The resident queen may live half a dozen years or more and generate many millions of offspring, but the long-term success of a colony depends on its power to seed more colonies. It must send out young virgin queens to start new nests, and it must send out males to inseminate aspiring queens from other far-flung hymenopteran nations.

If worker bees and ants are thought of as the heart, lungs, liver and brain of a colony — the vital organs that keep the body alive — male bees and maiden queens are the colony’s gonads — the organs that are tuned to tomorrow.

The male honeybee’s form bespeaks his sole function. He has large eyes to help find queens and extra antenna segments to help smell queens, but he is otherwise ill-equipped to survive. On reaching adulthood, he must linger in the hive for a few days until his exoskeleton dries and his wing muscles mature, all the while begging food from his sisters and thus living up to his tainted name, drone.

Come the brief mating season and the entire hive pulses with hope. The males fly out and head far from home, the better to minimize the chance of mating with kin. They seek out “lekking spots” where scores or hundreds of eager drones congregate 20 or 30 feet in the air and await passing maiden queens. Should a queen fly by, she may be mobbed by a dozen or more males, each seeking the chance to love her to death: bee flinging, like bee stinging, is a lethal affair. After a male deposits sperm in the queen, his little “endophallus” snaps off, and he falls to the ground. In her single nuptial flight, the queen will collect and store in her body the sperm offerings of some 20 doomed males, more than enough to fertilize a long life’s worth of eggs.

A successful male is a dead male. A failure lives to stagger home and beg to be fed and to try again tomorrow. After a week or so of lekking, that’s it. The drone is deemed a drain, and if he won’t die for love, he must die for its lack. “The workers will start withholding food, the male gets weakened, and at some point the workers will grasp him and dump him out of the hive,” said Gene E. Robinson, who studies bees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A heartless ending, perhaps, but what a box office smash. Over 100 million years of evolution, the social insects have come to rule the insect world, forcing solitary species out to the edges and to make do with their scraps. Dr. Hölldobler observes that although ants, bees, termites and other hive-minded tribes account for only 1 percent of known insect species, “this 1 percent makes up 80 percent of all insect biomass.” The dry weight of ants alone, he said, already equals the dry weight of our own. Who knows whether by tomorrow the standard master of our domain won’t have a thorax, six legs and be best addressed as Mistress.

I googled the term “Allegory” for something else I was working on, and when I got to the google entry from Wikipedia my eye caught the following paragraph:

There also existed a tradition in the Middle Ages of mythography—the allegorical interpretation of pagan myths. An illustrative example can be found in Sienna in a painting of a Christs crucifix (Sano di Pietro’s Crucifix, 15th c). At the top of the cross can be seen a bird pecking its own breast, blood pouring forth from the wound and feeding its waiting chicks below.

The artist, Sano di Pietro, lived from 1406 to 1481, and thus experienced the advent of print culture.

I’ve actually seen this painting, which is really quite amazing. Of course, Angels have wings and are rather bird-like.

If you want to astonish yourselves one day, do some random Amazon, IMDB, or google searches for Angel-related products, books, movies, tv shows, etc. during the 80s and 90s after the advent of the personal computer.

And if you are interested in angels , read the following brilliant book:

Stuart Schniederman, An Angel Passes: How the Sexes Became Undivided (NYU Press, 1988). Schniederman is a Lacanian analyst who practices in NYC.
Dr.B.

There’s a lengthy, rather negative review of Mel Brooks’s new broadway musical, “Young Frankenstein,” in today’s NYT, entitled, “Who Put the Trance in Transylvania?” I won’t paste below the whole review, but two things are worth noting: 1. the magical words in the title, i.e. a play on “trance” and “trans.” 2. The second paragraph of the review, pasted below, focuses mainly on the Ear, differentiates between the Ear and the Eye, then concludes with a reference to what we’re calling “magic words,” but what are commonly referred to as “puns.”

Even by the blaring standards of Broadway, “Young Frankenstein,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, stands out for its loudness — in its ear-splitting amplification, eye-splitting visual effects and would-be side-splitting jokes. It’s as if the production had been built on the premise that its audiences would be slow on the uptake and hard of hearing, the sort of folks who would say: “That pun flew right by me. Could you repeat it a couple of times, louder?

Have you ever noticed that the standard euphemism for sex is “the birds and the bees.” Birds, as we have begun to see, have longstanding mythical links to writing technologies. All ancient mythical systems map out carefully worked-through correspondences between birds and human communication, written and oral. Homer always refers to words as “winged words,” and for much of history since the introduction of parchment codexes, scribes used pens made out of bird quills for all writing. We’ll see more clearly why birds are associated with writing as we move back in time to Mesopotamia. But in Greek myth Hermes, the son of Zeus, is often associated with communication and the interpretation of writing. Hermes is always depicted as wearing winged sandals and a winged cap. He is chiefly the messenger of Zeus, both because he is very fast and because he was considered very loyal to his FATHER. Our current term for the interpretation of written works, “hermeneutics,” is derived from Hermes.

Interestingly, birds (and reptiles such as snakes/serpents) don’t have sex in the way that other animals do, inasmuch as there is no differentiation of sex organs and no penetration. Rather, male and female birds and reptiles both have cloacae, an opening through which eggs, sperm, and wastes pass. Intercourse is performed by pressing the lips of the cloacae together, during which time the male transfers his sperm to the female. So no 0 and 1. Male bees, on the other hand, do have external male genitals that are used to penetrate female bees during sex.

What we rarely think about is that the various species of honey bee are the only invertebrates (and indeed one of the few non-human groups) to have evolved a system of abstract symbolic communication. Indeed, Lacan talks about bee communication when he explains how the mirror stage works. Indeed, Lacan is quite taken by the various symbolic patterns that Bees perform. Male bees have external genitals, and interestingly enough communicate — as do humans — using abstract symbols. As such, both the birds and the bees are deeply integrated into the history of writing. I’m pasting below an article from the NYT today about bee behavior. Bee culture, as human culture once was, is matriarchal, with a queen in power, and no male equivalent. Life is pretty cruel for male bees, as it once must have been for human males — one of the reasons why myths almost always depict mothers as cruel and monstrous — and I think it could be argued that the history of the oppression of women is a kind of revenge for an earlier phase of history.

Now that the digital age is here, and we are living in a world utterly saturated in the symbolic, the one non-human group that also has a symbolic realm, bees, is mysteriously disappearing. Hmmmmm. Must be a coincidence.

November 9, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
The Real Life of Bees

By SUSAN BRACKNEY

THE walking, talking, sneaker-wearing honeybees in Jerry Seinfeld’s animated film certainly are cute. But if a beekeeper like me had been in the director’s chair, “Bee Movie” would have looked quite a bit different.

In Hollywood’s version, there are more than three times the number of male roles than female ones, but a cartoon of my own hive would have thousands of leading ladies and only a handful of male extras.

The nurses that tend the young and the workers that forage for pollen; the guards that keep predators like skunks away and the undertaker bees that unceremoniously haul out the dead: they’re all female. And whereas the movie’s protagonist is repeatedly told he must choose just one job and stick with it, my honeybees rotate through all of the available duties.

“Bee Movie” makes only passing mention of the queen. But she’s the life of the hive, too busy producing perhaps a million eggs during her two-to-three-year existence even to feed herself (she has attendants for that). Were my Russian queen drawn for the big screen (think Natasha from “Rocky & Bullwinkle”), she would make quick work of the macho pollen jocks in “Bee Movie.”

That’s because non-animated drones don’t collect pollen, or make beeswax, or even have stingers. If Mr. Seinfeld wanted realism (and an R rating), his male bees would be sex workers who do little more than mate with the queen — after which their genitals snap off. Worse: when winter comes, worker bees shove the freeloading males out into the cold. If drones are required in the spring, the queen will simply make more of them.

Apiarists haven’t had much reason to laugh this year, because bees have been ravaged by colony collapse disorder, a mysterious malady that’s caused some beekeepers to lose 90 percent of their hives.

But one of every three or four bites of food we eat is thanks to bees; we truck bees many miles to pollinate about 90 different crops, from apples and oranges to almonds and blueberries, a punishing circuit that overtaxes the few colonies left. Of course, in “Bee Movie,” pollen jocks merely buzz past and barren landscapes bloom instantaneously into Technicolor glory.

But all these apiarian inaccuracies will be easy to forgive if wise-cracking animated honeybees finally get people to care about the rapidly disappearing real thing.

Susan Brackney is the author of “The Insatiable Gardener’s Guide.”