03:08 PM CDT on Friday, June 8, 2007 | By STEVE STOLER / WFAA-TV
A mysterious and highly-destructive condition is wiping out the nation's honeybees.
Colony collapse disorder has already destroyed a quarter of US honeybees, raising serious concerns for the agriculture industry.
The poorly-understood epidemic has appeared in 24 states, including Texas.
Eric Simms, a Grayson County beekeeper, knew something was wrong when he opened one of his hives and found only a few adult bees.
"I hadn't seen the bees disappear like that before and neither had my wife," he said.
It had all the signs of colony collapse disorder. Since discovering that first empty box, he's lost half of all his hives but when Simms asks why, he can't seem to pin down one good explanation.
"[I thought of everything] ranging from cell phones, all the way to new diseases, that might have been brought in from some far away land that hasn't been studied or understood."
"Is it something that we're doing to our environment that is harming the bees?" said Shirley Acevedo, a Collin County beekeeper.
"People have speculated - maybe it's radiation, maybe it's cell phone towers," said another beekeeper, Alan Eynon.
Acevedo's hives are healthy but she, like beekeepers across the country, are worried.
"Our concern is at any time, we might find the same problem."
Each bee hive is made up of a series of eight frames. A healthy frame should have thousands of bees doing their job, building a honeycomb. When you look at a frame from a hive that has colony collapse disorder, you can see, most of the bees have left.
Keeping our honeybee population intact really matters.
"The food crops, many of them are dependent on it. Fruits and vegetables rely on honey bee pollination," Simms said.
Honeybees fertilize $15 billion in food crops, including apples, peaches, cucumbers, almonds and 80 other different types of produce. Experts predict as bee colonies continue to die off, the cost is likely to be passed on to consumers.
"We could all be a little more hungry. That could be a problem," Simms said.
One beekeeper, when asked about the seriousness of the colony collapse problem, quoted Albert Einstein: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left." According to Einstein, no more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals and no more man.