News has emerged of the latest threat to nature: drug-addled bees, hopped up on crack by crazed scientists...
read the full story here
Of course it does beg the question - Why?
My theory would be the smallest were too small to survive the winter unaided and the largest starved as the queen started laying in spring when there was little forage for them and very little stores left after the winter.
A spider is a webcrawler, an automated visitor usually reading the contents of webpages and logging them for one of the major search engines.
See here for the Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
here's a link to the story i think you're referring too
http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/organicgardening/herbicide_damage.php
at the bottom there are links to newspaper reports of the incidents
personally I believe that it is probably fiction
snopes [those wonderful debunkers of urban myths] currently have it as undetermined and like you can find no reference predating 1994
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp