What is "channels" in the expvars?

[ipmb]

I expected it would be the number of channels the bot is listening to for a given server. It's either something else or there's a bug:

    "weber-freenode-net-6697.0__0": {
        "channels": -2,
        "messages": 21235,
        "missed_ping": 10,
        "ping": 12,
        "pong": 0,
        "received_messages": 987727,
        "reply_whoischannels": 733475,
        "restart": 7
    }