Honeybees, domestic and feral, have had their numbers ravaged by a mite that eats through their exoskeleton and kills them. A queen honeybee mates only once, retaining enough sperm to allow her to lay eggs for one three-month season. With the demise of feral bees, queens have a lesser chance of mating, and may produce only drone bees. With no worker bees, the hive is doomed. Beekeepers in the United States now produce millions of pounds of honey and beeswax, and bees are important for pollinating crops that provide a portion of the food that Americans consume.
Honeybees also pollinate foods important to wildlife.
These include ragweed, wild beans, wild grapes and blackberries, sunflowers, sumac, clover, mulberries, goldenrod, sassafras, persimmons, ground cherry, hemp and lespedeza. The mite is a parasitic arachnid. They have largely wiped out feral honeybees, and have killed large numbers of the insects kept by bee keepers. Many of the wildlife foods that would otherwise be pollinated by feral bees are going untouched, a situation that results in less natural foods for wildlife, and farmers can no longer rely on feral bees to pollinate their crops. Beekeepers are trying to staunch the loss of bees with a miticide, buying time while researchers look for non-chemical means to control the parasites.