KANPUR, June 19 -- A surge in bee attacks has been witnessed in the last three months with three deaths reported in Uttar Pradesh, two of them from Kanpur. The month of May alone brought seven separate attacks across the state and among the injured were two Indian Administrative Service officers, and a number of state police services officers in Lalitpur, Bundelkhand. The pattern has become so alarming that the Uttar Pradesh government has now proposed adding bee attacks to its list of recognised disasters. In a recent meeting chaired by the state's chief secretary, it was proposed that victims of such attacks would be eligible for compensation under disaster relief provisions-up to Rs 4 lakh in the case of death. According to the proposal, bee attacks will now be treated alongside incidents involving wild animal encounters and house collapses. Scientists, who study bee behaviour, see the recent aggression as an ecological warning. The surge in attacks is directly linked to environmental stress, according to Dr Ankit Upadhyaya, an entomologist at the Chandra Shekhar Azad University of Agriculture and Technology, Kanpur. "Bees are struggling to find food," he explained. "The flowering cycle has been severely disrupted by soaring temperatures and erratic rainfall. With fewer blooms, bees face nectar shortages that leave colonies on edge-starved, hypersensitive and primed for defense," he said. The resulting aggression, he noted, is a stressed reaction to scarcity. P5...