In the midst of Justice Department investigations and wrangling over the Iraq War, a Congressional subcommittee was looking into another problem last month: something dramatic is happening to honeybees that is causing their colonies to die off.

Jim Doan, a beekeeper from Hamlin, was among a panel of academics and farmers sharing their concerns with members of Congress. After leaving Washington, Doan headed to Florida to buy replacement hives. He once had about 4,000 hives, but he has lost more than half of them. His parents, Ed and Judy Doan, had about 500 hives and, so far, they've lost about a third.

All along the Eastern seaboard, where the problem was first reported, the story is the same. It's being called Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder, a strange set of events that has alarmed beekeepers and agriculture experts around the country. Beekeepers, including many in Upstate New York, are finding their hives with honey, but nearly empty of bees.

Honeybees might better be called money bees, given their indispensable role in agriculture. In their foraging for nectar, honeybees are nature's perfect pollinators. Without them, experts say, our food production would drop by 30 to 40 percent, possibly more. Losses to growers of fruits, nuts, vegetables, and flowers would be staggering. Consumers would see higher prices for poorer quality fruits and vegetables, and folks like the Doans are predicting that could happen as soon as this summer.

"I consider myself lucky," says Clacy Vogt, a beekeeper in Greece. "I'm the exception compared to a lot of people I know. I'm only down about one-third of my hives. Most people are down about 50 percent or more. The bees, they just go out on flight one day and they never return."

Exactly what is causing the problem is a mystery. There are nearly as many theories as there are bee species: pesticides, mites, fungus, viruses, radio-tower frequencies, auto and jet exhaust, global warming, and genetic mutations to name a few. But no one knows for sure.

That Vogt's hives in some Upstate counties have died and those in other counties are fine has him most concerned about pesticides. And he says the problem is hurting little guys and big operators alike. In just the last two years, he says, he's seen prices for bees rise sharply, and beekeepers have already been hit hard by the rising cost of energy needed for some beekeepers to transport the bees.

"That's why Jim [Doan] is down there in Florida," says Vogt. "What else can he do? We were getting them for about $30 a pound. Now you're lucky if you can find them at $45 a pound. If you need 1,000 pounds, it really adds up fast."

It's still too early to know what might be causing the Colony Collapse Disorder, says UR professor Robert Minckley, who has been studying bees for the last 25 years.

"The strange thing about all of this is that as important as the honeybee is to agriculture, it really hasn't been adequately monitored," he says. "We don't know for sure if we are witnessing something that is new or something that is old. The data collection is sort of limited and at present inadequate to begin to approach the problem."

Minckley thinks the disorder probably has more than a single cause. It could be a pathogen like a virus or fungus. And some examinations of bees where the hive hasn't been abandoned have shown that bees have not one pathogen, but many.

The disorder could also be the result of evolving practices in agriculture, says Minckley. As agriculture has changed in the US, so has beekeeping.

There are two main purposes for keeping hives: honey production and pollination. Humans' taste for honey is believed to have started as early as the Mesolithic cave dwellers, but it was the ancient Egyptians who began keeping hives. Honey was the only sweetener used at the time, and it was versatile. It could be stored and moved easily, and in addition to flavoring foods, wines, and drinks, it was used in things like makeup and bandages.

Farmers in Europe began keeping hives and brought the practice to the US. Beekeeping has usually been a family tradition that is part hobby and part business. It takes time and effort to learn how to keep a hive healthy, and the skills have often been passed from one generation to the next.

As commercial agriculture took hold in the US, some farmers began raising honeybees strictly as pollinators. The migrating hives, as they are called, are trucked all over the country, following the growing seasons.

"The keepers stack them on the skids so they can be moved by a tractor," says Clacy Vogt. "They are real heavy, and that's why I don't do pollinating any more."

In the fall, more than half of the commercial hives from the northeast are moved to Florida citrus groves, where the bees begin pollinating fruit trees. Heading north, they are moved from peach trees in Georgia up to the cranberry bogs of Maine. Some people argue that the bees literally live on these trucks instead of more natural settings.

And that, Minckley says, may be contributing to the problem.

"It's stressful on the bees to be moved this way," he says. "In February, you'll see a lot of the commercial hives moved out to California because of the almond and nut orchards. They don't have enough hives in the whole state anymore to do the job. Putting them on these trucks is something I like to compare to putting a classroom of first graders in a room for a while. There are a lot of different agents that thrive in these environments, and they are easily transmitted."

"Healthy bees are remarkably resistant to infections and infestations," says Judy Doan. She and her husband Ed have been keeping honeybee hives out in Hamlin for 55 years. "This is the troubling thing," she says. "Something is weakening them, and this is making them more susceptible to pests."

Bees spend a considerable part of their day grooming and cleaning. Recent problems with a parasite called a Varroa mite are being blamed on the weakened conditions that the mites find in their unlucky hosts. The mites suck fluids from the bees, but not enough to kill them. There are treatments for the mites, but the mites can mutate and develop resistance, creating greater problems. The better approach, beekeepers like the Doans say, would be to find out what is weakening the health of the honeybees in the first place.

Peter Semmel, president of the Ontario County Beekeepers Association, has been keeping hives since he was 6 years old. It was something he learned from his father who, in turn, had learned it from his father. The association has about 150 members from the five-county Rochester region. Most are over 40, and Semmel says that at 25, he's probably one of the youngest members.

Semmel and longtime beekeeper Sam Hall offer beekeeping classes and provide students with all of the materials they need to get started, including a queen. Each student has at least one mentor, who helps them with maintenance. One reason he is teaching the classes is to help keep the tradition going, says Semmel, and he thinks poor maintenance, particularly in the migrating commercial hive industry, has something to do with the Colony Collapse Disorder.

"In my opinion, these hives are not well equipped," he says. "They are just moved from crop to crop so quickly. The commercial beekeepers don't rotate the structured system of the comb. It should be done once a year - at least once every three years. You have to fully replace the parts, so some people just let it go to reduce costs. But as it gets dirtier, the cells [where honey is stored] become smaller and smaller. They sort of clog up."

Like many beekeepers, Semmel is also concerned about pesticides. One in particular is getting a lot of attention: Imidacloprid, first banned in France and later much of Western Europe, it's still available in the US under many names. It is supposed to be used to control grubs, ticks, and termites. With termites, it causes a form of memory loss. Bees are similar to termites, and many beekeepers say the symptoms of Colony Collapse Disorder are identical to the poison's impact on termites: the majority of bees leave the queen in the hive and can't seem to find their way back. When disoriented stragglers do return, the ritualistic order of the hive breaks down.

The world of honeybees can quickly become a passion, says Sam Hall, who has been keeping hives most of his life, and raises only queens now. He has worked with many different types of bees, trying to produce the best queens.

"I have a friend who is a master gardener who wanted to learn how to keep hives for his garden," he says. "His gardens were something hard to describe: they were just so incredibly beautiful. Well, you know how time-consuming gardening can be. He became so fascinated with beekeeping that he abandoned his gardens and only keeps the hives. It's a fascination that can overtake you."

Honeybees live in colonies that are more opera than jazz. Theirs is a society where each bee has a specific role, with little room for improvisation. There are anywhere from 70,000 to 90,000 bees in a healthy hive. Inevitably, their life involves total servitude to the needs of the colony's queen. A single bee produces less than a half teaspoon of honey during its lifetime, but together they will produce about 60 pounds of honey in a season.

Most of the honeybees we see are females, and they assume worker-bee chores the instant they become able adults. Some are relegated to cleaning the cell chambers of the hive. Some are nurse bees, spending their time caring for the larva and nurturing them to maturity. Some guard the hive. Most are foragers, spending hours on sunny days collecting nectar and pollen and returning with it to the hive. There, another set of bees takes the nectar and combines the pollen with their own enzymes to make bee bread, food for the larva.

"Some fertilized eggs will be taken to cells where they are bombarded with royal jelly," says Hall. "It's a highly potent substance reserved for eggs that will become queens."

Male bees are drones. Like all male bees, honeybee drones are defenseless. They have no stingers, and they can't survive without the vigilance of the worker bees, who feed and groom them.

When a young queen emerges from her cell, she soon flies off to find a congregating mass of drones, mating with more than a dozen of them. The unfortunate drones die during fertilization. Any that have not been able to fertilize a queen are pushed out of their colony by the worker bees before the first frost comes, because they serve no future purpose.

"It's most unfortunate if the new queens emerge either together or before the old queen has left," Hall says. "They don't like competition, so they will fight until they kill each other. Not a good thing. If you're a young queen, hopefully you'll get out of there still intact."

The worker bees, as the name implies, literally work themselves to death. Within three weeks, their wings tattered and shredded, the workers go off to die. Those often seen wandering aimlessly in the grass are probably weakened and exhausted worker bees.

Bees do survive the winter. "Oh, yes, they are alive in there inside the hive all right," says Hall. "They cluster around the queen and vibrate, moving from the inside of the cluster to the outside of the cluster. That way everyone is a little warm and a little cold, and it keeps the temperature even at around 72 degrees. If they have food [honey] and they can get to it without freezing, they are fine."

When the worker bees have filled a wax cell with honey, they cap the hexagon-shaped cell with a wax seal. Eventually they will create combs of cells filled with honey for safekeeping in different chambers of the hive. But many beekeepers provide the bees with additional food in the fall to help them get through the winter. Lately, that hasn't helped. The result is a condition that beekeepers call deadout.

"They do have to be strong," says Hall. "It's really quite sad when you see that they have clustered and there is plenty of food for them, but they were not strong enough to reach the food cell. They can be an inch a way, but they can't make it and starve."

Jim Doan made his trip to Washington to lobby Congress for research money, says his father, Ed Doan. Researchers at Penn State, the University of California at Davis, and to a lesser extent, Cornell, have been working on the problem with limited funding.

"We need help to know scientifically what is really happening here," says Ed Doan. "The industry is hurting. This is our livelihood. We have been producing honey and wax for years, and this is our sole source of income. If this continues, it will become too expensive to make it worthwhile."

And the damage caused by Colony Collapse Disorder is not limited to fruits and flowers, the Doans point out. Dairy farmers and ranchers raising livestock will feel the pinch, too.

"Alfalfa and clover are part of the food chain, and the farmers need the honeybees in order to make seeds to replant their fields," he says. "What people need to understand is that there are other pollinators: birds, other insects, even other bees. But they are not anywhere as efficient at pollinating as honeybees. People have been trying for years to see if it could be done, but it just doesn't work. I mean, if honeybees went away, we would still have fruit. But it wouldn't be like the fruit that consumers are used to seeing in their grocery market."

The Doans say that beekeepers across the country have found a friend in Montana Senator Max Baucus. In a letter to US Agriculture Secretary Michael Johanns, Baucus wrote: "If these alarming trends are allowed to continue, they will place at risk in excess of $14 billion in annual US farm output that depends on bee pollination."

By April, the Doans' bees are usually venturing out of their hives and are already at work. This year, Judy Doan says, the cold has put them behind. She is worried about them, she says, but watching them emerge after months of winter is something she looks forward to every spring.

"I think about these little bees, so small and so unassuming," she says. "I can't help but marvel every time I watch them. The skills, organization, direction, the way every bee contributes - in many ways it's a perfect society."