The best answer probably lies in examining the context in which the earliest citations of this putative quote (that we’ve found so far) appeared: a January 1994 political protest staged by European beekeepers over the issues of competition from lower-priced honey imports, artificially high prices for sugar (used as winter feed for bees), and a proposed reduction of tariffs that would make imported honey products even cheaper. A key part of that protest was beekeepers’ issuing dire predictions that, as beekeepers go, so go the bees — and as bees go, so go the food crops and other plants on which we depend