Her large, golden abdomen announced her as ruler of one of nature's most elegant social orders, a marvel of reproductive efficiency able to lay 1,500 eggs per day.

"She's going to get her head pinched," Hackenberg said before squeezing her to a smudge of pulp between his fingers.

He and his crew killed dozens of queens on this day in mid March - and, with them, most of the standard ideas about bees and beekeeping.

Forget about beekeepers as the gentle guardians of a natural process.

They treat their hives - an insect colony, after all - with insecticides. They weed out underperforming queens and replace them with mass-bred imports. They truck their bees around the country to capitalize on the highest pollination fees. Recently, Hackenberg began sanitizing empty bee boxes with low doses of radiation.

The farmland where the bees forage has also been pushed to the limit - or beyond, as seems likely with the sudden appearance of colony collapse disorder. Beekeepers have reported the abandonment of about 700,000 hives throughout the country, including 35 to 40 percent of the colonies in Florida.

Almost as disturbing are the early signs of trouble inside Hackenberg's bee boxes. Instead of order and industry - the little utopias we've all heard about - he found queens laying eggs randomly, two in one cell, none in the next. He saw workers wandering listlessly over the comb.

"Chaos is a good word for it," Hackenberg said. "Mystery and chaos at the same time."

SIGN OF SOMETHING BIG

Hackenberg, 58, is an expansive man: 6 feet 2, a loud and entertaining talker seldom unplugged from his ear-mounted cell phone. For fun, he and his wife, Linda, cruise around on a three-wheel Honda Gold Wing with stainless steel mud flaps and purple-and-green light bars.

He likes beekeeping for the usual reason - the fascinating view of society in miniature - but the opposite is true as well. Beekeepers, he said, are the farmers of the whole countryside.

Driving south from his winter home near Dade City to the citrus belt of southern Polk County, he pointed to a stand of pale-green willows in a phosphate mine retention area. These trees have kept his bees fed in winter, and he notices when they turn yellow with pollen and when they break into bloom.

It is the same in Pennsylvania, his summer headquarters, where his bees pollinate pumpkins; in Maine, where he expects to collect $90 per hive this summer for pollinating blueberries; in upstate New York, where his bees produce high-grade clover honey.

"I see things the average person doesn't even notice," he said.

Mostly, in 40 years of traveling the country with his bees, he has seen things go bad.

Back in the 1970s, Hackenberg and other beekeepers had plenty of time to hunt and fish after they set their hives.

Development has since consumed orange groves and flatwoods covered with palmettos, a prime source of wildflower honey.

Invasive, blood-sucking mites appeared 20 years ago, forcing him to treat each hive with a strip of chemical insecticide. He now uses a more natural alternative, formic acid.

Photo: A bee scavanges empty hives for pollen and honey. Of the 400 hives Dave Hackenberg put out last October all but about 30 were mysteriously abandoned.

He has seen careless applications of pesticides on crops leave the ground beneath his hives blanketed with dead bees.

So, stunning as the recent collapse has been, it is not a complete surprise.

As bees forage for nectar and pollen, they can pick up chemicals or new strains of disease, all of which they faithfully deliver back to the hive. If colonies fail, it usually means something in the environment is fouled up, Hackenberg said.

"It seems like everything is."

CREATING HEALTHY HIVES

Beekeepers always lose bees in the winter, but starting in November, Hackenberg found his hives deserted by the hundreds - 2,000 in all, two-thirds of his stock.

"I had tears in my eyes many a night," he said.

The spring citrus bloom, though, is a time when beekeepers look to rebuild their colonies for the coming pollination season.

Hackenberg and his son Davey - driving trucks loaded with empty bee boxes - rolled into a weedy pasture next to a grove near Fort Meade, 50 miles southeast of Tampa. They pulled on protective veils and lit smokers to subdue the bees.

These 64 troubled hives had been set out two weeks earlier in hopes that the strong nectar flow could flush them of the pesticide - an insect neurotoxin - that Hackenberg thinks has caused the mass die-off.

Then, ideally, the nectar-fed bees will go on to build hives big and healthy enough to be split into two or three new colonies.

Right away, though, Davey noticed an agitated, high-pitched whine rather than the steady thrum of vigorous hives. He saw workers flying in circles around the pasture rather than making the proverbial beelines to and from the grove.

The late-season cold snap, Hackenberg said, probably drove the bees back into their hives, where they ate contaminated pollen that had been collected and stored up North.

He and Davey found more evidence of this after opening the bee boxes: the "shotgun" laying patterns of weak, confused queens; neglectful workers; swarms of common pests, such as small hive beetles, that healthy bees usually repel.

"This one is just crawling," Hackenberg said, looking down on the wooden base of a hive where he saw as many black, BB-sized beetles as he did bees. "This thing is polluted!"

After two hours of lifting bee boxes, sifting through hives and hunting down deficient queens, they counted 20 collapsed hives. They created only 30 new hives, about half as many as they had expected.

"A couple of months ago, I thought we might be able to make up our numbers (of lost hives), but now I don't think so," said Davey, 35, part owner of the family apiary.

"When you go through a bee yard like this one, seeing nothing but dead stuff, it's depressing."

AN APPEAL FOR HELP

His father has now taken on another job. Though unpaid, this one is going well.

After finding his deserted hives last fall, the elder Hackenberg, former president of the American Beekeeping Federation, went public.

He has been quoted in newspapers and has appeared on television and radio shows. He has helped convince agriculture officials of the need for the team of scientists now studying the collapse. He is lobbying Congress to allocate more money for research.

From the beginning, he maintained that the massive die-off is not just a problem for beekeepers, but a national crisis. Because of mites and dwindling forage, the number of bees and keepers has declined sharply in recent years.

Unless things turn around, he says, there will too few bees to pollinate the crops that depend on them: almonds, apples, cherries, melons and several varieties of citrus.

In this context, bad news is good news. It helps the cause.

On the drive home, Hackenberg called fellow beekeepers, a blueberry grower, an importer of queens from Australia. To all, he passed on the latest, which suggested the situation was even worse than he had thought.

"I've been talking to guys in Canada and New York who have just gotten out to check their hives," he said to Danny Weaver of Texas, the current president of the beekeepers federation.

"Seventy percent seems to be the magic number on bee losses."

Dan DeWitt can be reached at (352)754-6116 or dewitt@sptimes.com.

The mass abandonment of beehives throughout the country is, officially, a mystery.

Among the possible causes are drought, fungi, the insecticides beekeepers use to control mites and the stress of trucking bees around the country in a race for high pollination fees.

"We have a whole bunch of things on the table," said Dennis vanEnglesdorp, the acting state apiarist of Pennsylvania and a member of the Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group, which was formed to study the die-off.

But David Hackenberg and many of his fellow beekeepers think they know what is killing their bees: an increasingly prevalent class of insecticide called neonicotinoids that they suspect for the following reasons:

Neonicotinoids have been strictly limited in France since the 1990s, when they were implicated in a similar mass die-off.

The use of neonicotinoids has spread rapidly in recent years as the hives began collapsing.

Neonicotinoids are artificial forms of nicotine that act as neurotoxins to insects, entomologists say. That may account for worker bees neglecting to provide food for eggs and larvae, and for a breakdown of the bees' navigational abilities.

The first widely used neonicotinoid was approved by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1994, and quickly became popular, said Mark Mossler, a plant medicine expert at the University of Florida.

Neonicotinoids are less toxic to humans than most old-line pesticides and, because they are absorbed by the plants, can be narrowly focused to the pests that feed on the treated crop. But because the chemicals are taken up by the plants, they are likely to appear in nectar and pollen of crops that cover vast areas.

Extensive testing, however, has never proven these concentrations are high enough to harm bees, said Chris Mullin, a Penn State entomologist.

The honeybees' confusion could be a result of other potential problems the study group is investigating, including viruses, vanEnglesdorp said. He worries that focusing on neonicotinoids could mean neglecting other concerns in the industry. The chemicals have become the prime suspect, he said, "because beekeepers can talk to their growers about it and they can do something about it."

But doing something about neonicotinoids will not be easy. Recently, Hackenberg and fellow beekeepers pleaded with orange growers in Polk County to delay spraying the groves until the end of the blossom season.

"We've been telling them, just give us another 10 days and our bees will be out of there," Hackenberg said. "But the chemical people say, 'No, you've got to spray now.'

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/04/08/Floridian/One_beekeeper_s_chaos.shtml