The Hive Detectives

Synopsis

Without honey bees the world would be a different place. There would be no honey, no beeswax for candles, and, worst of all, barely a fruit, nut, or vegetable to eat. So imagine beekeeper Dave Hackenburg "s horror when he discovered twenty million of his charges had vanished. Those missing bees became the first casualties of a mysterious scourge that continues to plague honey bee populations today.

In The Hive Detectives, Loree Griffin Burns profiles bee wranglers and bee scientists who have been working to understand colony collapse disorder, or CCD: the Hackenburgs, who move their three thousand beehives from coast to coast in order to pollinate crops; Mary Duane, who raises bees and bottles blue ribbon honey; Dennis van Engelsdorp, Jeffrey Pettis, Diana Cox-Foster, and Maryann Frazier, who study bees from every possible angle in an attempt to discover what is killing them.

In this dramatic and enlightening story, readers explore the lives of the fuzzy, buzzy insects and learn what might happen to us if they were gone.