Here is my speculative model: animals are capable of numerous modes of behaviour, because they need to survive diverse individual and collective circumstances. Ancestors of present-day species "have seen it all": tough times, catastrophic times, mad times, quiet times, good times, overabundance times, invador competitors or predators, synergetic buddies - they had to survive each of that. In particular, they have been very violent, or very greedy, like us today. But that was not necessary for the survival, apparently. Or moreover, a more sure way to keep good times going was to switch off aggression and greed. (Who knows, evolution might have came up with solutions even against follies of newly successful species, foolish "discoverers" of unbounded growth. Humanity might not have registered everything yet.)
Within this model, the elephants might have indeed went into an ancient "mad" mode, out of recognisable stress or something. Conceivably, strain signals might multiply across species...
One problem: "A flood of imported honey from China and Argentina has depressed honey prices and put more pressure on beekeepers to take to the road in search of pollination contracts. Beekeepers are trucking tens of billions of bees around the country every year."
Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the state of Pennsylvania who is part of the team studying the bee colony collapses, said the "strong immune suppression" investigators have observed "could be the AIDS of the bee industry," making bees more susceptible to other diseases that eventually kill them off.
To give bees energy while they are pollinating, beekeepers now feed them protein supplements and a liquid mix of sucrose and corn syrup carried in tanker-sized trucks costing $12,000 per load.
