Bee hives throughout Europe and North America have undergone partial or complete depopulation since the fall of 2006, an unprecedented loss on a massive scale that has greatly alarmed beekeeper's and ecologists.

In some areas of the world 90 percent of the bees have either died or simply disappeared, a trend which, if unchecked, could collapse much of the planet's food chain. Most North American food crops are dependent on honeybees as pollinators.

Clues are beginning to emerge about why the bees may be disappearing in a phenomenon that has been dubbed 'colony collapse disorder.' A Florida Department of Agriculture official, Jerry Hayes described the situation this way in March for the TV program Living On Earth: “Bees are leaving the colonies and not coming back. They're actually disappearing as if the adult workers, the foragers, are going out and not remembering how to get home. So there aren't any dead bodies. The hives basically dwindle over time. The honey bee's immune system seems to be compromised. There is a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, of which an active ingredient has been banned in some countries because it has been found to damage pollinators. It is a chemical that has a tendency to cause the bees to forget how to get home. These chemicals are used pervasively in U.S. agriculture.”

In London where there were about 10,000 bee hives in 2006, half of them mysteriously disappeared during the winter of 2006-2007. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Chairman of the London Beekeeping Association, John Chapple, told U.S. journalist Linda Moulton Howe a few weeks ago that 'pesticide cocktails' might be responsible for the colony collapses. “All the chemicals over the years that we have been pouring into the hives might have messed up the bees' senses...Most people think that bees just produce honey. They don't realize that their main function in life, the most important thing to us, is pollination. People don't realize that without pollinating insects, we won't have berries on trees and so we won't have birds. If we don't have birds, it just works up the food chain.”

Still another theory about the bee disappearances comes from research conducted at the University of Halle in eastern Germany, where bee populations have diminished by up to 80 percent. A research team found evidence that toxins from a genetically modified corn variant, that was designed to repel insects, may have affected the bee's immune systems to allow parasites that are normally harmless to proliferate inside the bees and kill them.

Genome maps of the honeybee have revealed that the insect does not have a complement of genes that enables it to take many synthetic poisons out of its system, nor does this insect have as many immune-disease fighting genes as a fruitfly or a mosquito. That is according to University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.

Whatever the cause, as our collective attention stays fixated on global warming we may be overlooking an equally significant and faster acting threat to our longterm survival that exists right in our front and back yards.