6:40pm Tuesday 20th July 2010
Hive Mind By Simon Bovey was aired Monday on BBC Radio 4 in the Afternoon Play slot but it will be available on the Afternoon play website as listen again until the 25th May.
Spring in 2019 is not the riot of colour it used to be. The honeybee is now officially officially extinct. Farmer Sam Clark struggles to raise a crop worth a damn. But man has adapted. Every spring an army of migrant workers, led by foreman Amra Walczak, descends on Sam's farm to pollinate by hand. It is a laborious process but it works. This spring, however, science offers a new solution, Honeybots, tiny robots that are effectively crawling bees, and Sam's put his farm forward for a trial.
Once released, thousands of Honeybots course through the fields, pollinating the flowers in a fraction of the time it takes Amra and her team. Their job done they return automatically to their hive chest. They are quick and efficient.
That evening, however, dead birds and mice are found in the fields the Honeybots have worked.
Liz Wright listened to the play and found it an interesting basis for future discussion on many levels. "Afternoon play is to be congratulated," she said " They have attempted to capture the current challenges in bee losses and imaginatively extend the problem to a fictional but chilling conclusion."
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