VANCOUVER, Canada -- For millions of years, honeybees have been doing what they do best -- transforming the nectar from blossoms into thick, sweet honey. Since the development of agriculture, they have also been ensuring that the pollination necessary for the production of the world's fruits and vegetables takes place. In North America alone, bees pollinate close to $10 billion worth of crops each year. While many insects serve as pollinators, it is the hard-working honeybee who plays the most important role.
These industrious insects boast an amazingly complex social hierarchy. They form colonies of up to 80,000 individuals organized in rigid caste systems -- a single queen, her drones, or males, and tens of thousands of worker bees. Scientists now know there are even subgroups in each colony that are formed according to who their drone father was, and that these groups behave differently. During the day, worker bees travel up to 10 km per round trip in search of nectar, pollen or other plant substances, and it takes no fewer than 1,600 round trips to produce a single ounce of honey -- just 28 grams. They have even developed sophisticated forms of communication, including a "dance" language to indicate the direction and distance of feeding sites.
Over the last few decades, however, bees have been bringing home more than their usual harvest. A tiny white mite no bigger than the head of a pin has been catching a ride back into the hive on the backs of bees and wreaking destruction in colonies around the world.