The Burns and the Bees (S20, E08-428)

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Plot Summary
At a billionaires camp, Mr. Burns has a grand ol' time with his fellow billionaires.  During a poker game, he's able to win a professional basketball team from a rich Texan, the "Austin Celtics".  A short time later, Burns watches his team play the Dallas Mavericks and is flabbergasted over the flamboyant antics of Dallas' owner, Mark Cuban.  Burns decides to try some publicity acts of his own in his team's first home game.  Having renamed the team the Springfield Excitement, Burns is unable to drum up any excitement with his dated, annoying antics.  As people leave in drones, Burns comes up with an idea to get them back: a state-of-the-art arena.

Meanwhile, Lisa learns that the bee population is dying around the world.  She gets help from Professor Frink who tells Lisa that bees have contracted a deadly disease, and that they need to start up an unaffected colony.  Lisa attracts an unaffected queen, and is able to get it to sting her, attracting other bees and basically giving Lisa a beard of bees.  Given this is the only way the bees can survive for now, Lisa takes the bees with her back home.  Marge, unsettled by this, eventually finds a place for Lisa to keep the bees: an abandoned greenhouse.  Lisa is happy that her bees have done so well, however suddenly the greenhouse is hit with a wrecking ball; it turns out that Mr. Burns has chosen this site for his new arena.  After a failed attempt to sway the public at the town meeting, Lisa is forced to take her bees away before the construction kills them.

At Moe's, Lisa laments that her bees are unlikely to survive much longer in the jar she has them in.  As she leaves, Moe lets Homer know that he has with him a colony of Africanized bees and that if they mixed with Lisa's bees, the resulting group of bees would likely survive in any environment.  Homer agrees, and grabs Lisa's queen bee to mate with Moe's bees.  Six weeks later, Burns' arena is complete, and at the same time nearby Homer goes to show Lisa the new bees.  However, these are some angry bees, and Homer accidentally lets them fly free.  They head for the arena, shaped oddly like a bee colony, and swarm Burns' arena with nobody able to stop them.  Overnight, it becomes a bee sanctuary, and Burns is forced to abandon it much to Lisa's joy.  The next year, at the billionaire's camp, Burns tells this story, as well as the fact that he had to write off over $800 million because of it.  The other billionaires realize that write off makes his worth less than a billion, and promptly toss him over to the dirty ol' millionaires camp.

Quick Review
This episode has its moments - not enough of them - but moments, anyway.  Mark Cuban provided an okay guest spot, I suppose, nothing all that good, but it wasn't throwaway either.  The whole plot with the bees was decent, better than Burns' plot, but as a whole the episode wasn't all that great.

As an aside, this episode uses a modified version of its opening that gives it a Christmas theme.  This is the second episode to use this modified opening; Season 18's Kill Gil, Volumes I & II also used this opening.  Unlike that episode, this episode featured no Christmas theme outside of the opening.  Its also odd timing; the following episode will be the last episode to use the show's classic opening before it debuts its new HD opening.

Final Score: 6.9