The mite can severely weaken or kill entire honeybee hives. You can't see them at first, or even hear them. The boxes give them away. In a dirt lot alongside a field of alfalfa seed plants, hundreds of pine containers are stacked on pallets. They pollinated almonds and cherries in California, cantaloupe and watermelons in Arizona.
More melons await, along with cotton and alfalfa.
But some have come home to die. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt labeled Bee World Inc., Ken Orletsky inspects his lot, prying open boxes and pulling out screens laden with thousands of bees. There are four colonies per pallet, each colony swarming with as many as 40,000 bees. Then Orletsky comes upon a half-empty pallet. Managed colonies owned by beekeepers such as Orletsky have dwindled from 5 million to 2.4 million, while the number of US beekeepers has fallen from 212,000 to about 125,000.