Although the ROM does tend to display dead things like mummies and taxidermied animals, the recent death of 20,000 bees in the biodiversity gallery was anything but planned. And now museum officials are stumped as to what lead to such a turn of events. We don't really know what caused it," said gallery coordinator Claire Watts. "We're pretty sure starvation wasn't the cause of death because they died so quickly. It's not really anything the ROM did."

So how did the entire colony drop dread? Janine McGowan, a University of Guelph researcher and the ROM's beekeeper told the Star that it's to early to tell the cause of of the colony's collapse, but noted that a number factors could be the culprit, including a lack of winter worker bees, a funguslike organism called Nosema, or simply poor ventilation.

Or perhaps the sight of Daniel Libeskind's crystal finally wore them down? We may never know.

Photo by andyscamera in the blogTO Flickr pool.