If the buzzing of honeybees were suddenly to go silent in the countryside, much of agriculture would shut down, too, says the Meredith magazine Successful Farming.

Production of crops like apples, almonds, berries and melon crops would virtually disappear, for the lack of pollination. There would be no seed for alfalfa and clover. The honeybee is an important pollinator of crops like soybean, sunflowers and cotton.Some 65 million acres of United States crops depend at least partly on insect pollination, and honeybees handle most of the work. The honeybee's value to agriculture as a pollinator of crops is worth an estimated $10 billion annually, according to Science magazine.

Honeybees are unlikely to become an endangered species, experts agree. But the beneficial insect no longer can be taken for granted, either.

The honeybee industry is being hammered by several forces: a severe outbreak of mites, the invasion of Africanized bees and the recent loss of the federal honey price-support program. Large imports of cheap honey, mostly from China, have added to the industry's woes. Moreover, honey prices in fall 1994 were about 25 percent below 1993 levels. As many as 20 percent of the nation's commercial beekeepers have gone out of business since 1990.

Wild bees used to help with pollination of crops. But the spread of parasitic mites has nearly wiped out feral honeybees in the United States. The mites have taken a heavy toll on maintained colonies as well, and mite control adds an input cost that beekeepers can ill afford now. "The mites caught a lot of beekeepers by surprise," says Roy Weaver, a Texas beekeeper and honey-packer. "But the biggest issue is the lack of profitability in the industry."

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If there's a bright spot in the industry, it's the growing demand for pollinator bees, says Blane White, state apiary inspector in Minnesota. "In the long term, pollination services may become the major source of income for beekeepers," White says.

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