It wouldn’t matter if all the bees died

But don’t worry, says Rod Liddle, they’re not going to. The bee holocaust myth is just another example of our strange yearning for catastrophe

The world is going to end in 2012, apparently — hopefully just before the start of the Olympic Games. Armageddon may come about as a consequence of those monkeys firing up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they have al-Qa’eda operatives attempting to create black holes which will swallow the earth whole, or reduce it to the size of an extremely dense tennis ball.

Imagine seven billion of us trying to stand on a tennis ball. You just hope personal hygiene standards won’t be sacrificed. Or perhaps it will be giant solar flares frazzling the earth, or a sudden reversal of the earth’s magnetic field which will see us cooked like cheap burgers in a microwave oven. How do we know this? Apparently the Mayans predicted it.