Buzz Kill

"It was a complete, horrifying mystery," says Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeping Federation.

But it had to be solved fast. This wasn't a problem afflicting just a few scattered hobbyists. The food chain was under attack. Every third bite of the human diet comes from plants pollinated by bees.

"Honey bees are the most important pollinators on the planet," Gene Robinson of the University of Illinois said recently. "They pollinate vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds. If bees go away, we're eating gruel."

Entomologists suddenly found themselves taking on the role of medical investigator, trying to determine the cause of this strange disease they dubbed "colony collapse disorder." In September, a group of scientists stumbled on a possible culprit: the Israeli acute paralysis virus. Though it had been identified a few years before, scientists believe it may have mutated into a fatal form, causing instant paralysis in affected bees.

But the link has not been accepted by everyone in the scientific community. Some claim that pesticides, fatigue, and global warming are all contributing to the bees' elimination.

In the meantime, they continued to die by the thousands. So keepers came up with makeshift solutions. In China, fruit farmers employ workers to hand-pollinate their trees. Others are importing bees from Australia and New Zealand. And in Ohio, keepers are attempting to breed a "super bee" — a new strain immune to disease and the cold. The project is dubbed "the Ohio Queen Project."

Last spring, members of the Ohio State Beekeepers Association surveyed the few remaining bees that survived the winter. Nine regional coordinators closely examined the insects, looking to find as many queen bees as they could that were gentle, healthy, and proven honey producers. Then, they artificially inseminated these bees with the sperm of attractive male stock. The hope is that a few of these bee lines will prove resistant to both the cold and the disease.

"We're looking for survivability," says Joe Latshaw, one of the coordinators.

They won't know until next spring which — if any — of the strains survived. But the ones that do will be valuable. Commercial keepers look for young bees with proven, superior genes. The surviving offspring could go for $500 apiece, Flottum says. And the Ohio keepers are looking to start a sort of Match.com for bees, where people can go online to examine a bee's traits and family lineage, says Dana Stallman, the organization's president.

But organizers say the project's primary purpose isn't profit. Historically, Ohio keepers looked to southern growers to start new colonies. But these insects aren't used to midwestern winters. Last year, they weren't strong enough to fight off both the freezing temperatures and colony collapse disease. The few bees that survived were mostly Ohio-bred stock.

So keepers are looking to create a superior "buckeye bee." If they succeed, they might lure back keepers who gave up on the business after last season. That's why the project has agreed to give away the offspring — if any survive the coming winter.

Flottum isn't so optimistic. Dressed in a futuristic keeper's suit and netted veil, he walks out to the blue hives in his Medina backyard. As he lifts one of the pointy roofs, bees swarm around his head like a dust storm. In February, he made this same short walk, only to find that five of his six colonies were dead. Instead of producing 500 pounds of honey, he produced only 60.

He took solace in the colony that survived, infusing its genes into his new hives. It's too soon to know what fate holds for them, he says, gazing adoringly at his insects. But around the country, early signs aren't looking so good.

In Florida, keepers are reporting the same depressing statistics as last year. Bees vanishing — with no trace of their corpses — and once healthy hives collapsing in a week.

"This is a big problem," Flottum sighs. "If breeding doesn't work, if this disease gets any worse, I just don't know what we're going to do."