The causes of the bee's troubles are the tracheal and varroa mites. In the early 1980's beekeepers smuggled South American honey bee queens into the United States, hoping to create a super-pollinator breed that would be more effective and subsequently produce more honey. The smuggled queens also hosted the mites, and from that moment it was disaster for the North American honey bee. Some of the queens escaped into the wild and were adopted by local hives. Mites are quickly spread throughout a hive since bees spend a great deal of time grooming themselves and other bees.
Bees normally live for about thirty days, but infected bees survive for only three to five days.
The tracheal mite tunnels through the bee's windpipe to feed on the bee's blood and the varroa mite attacks the bee externally, also feeding on its blood. The situation is made worse by the fact that crop growers routinely hire beekeepers to transport their hives to the fields, thus virtually ensuring that any healthy bee colonies remaining are wiped out within weeks of the arrival of the infected insects. Not all is lost, however. It's estimated that native bees may become mite-resistant within ten to twenty years, just as their South American and European counterparts have. In the meantime, the Department of Agriculture has researched the use of mite-resistant queens from the Primorsky region along the Russian Pacific coast.