It's certainly true that many intertwining factors make the food and agriculture business work at their best, and one factor which is in the process of being systematically wiped out is the presence of bees in north America. Bees are widely needed throughout the agriculture business as a means of pollination, meaning that professional bee-keepers often move their hives around the country and the presence of bees apparently adds $15 billion in value to crops.

Colony collapse disorder
This co-dependence is leaving the worlds' crop producers in dismay, as a mysterious disease is wiping out millions of bee hives all over the world, most notably in North America and Europe. The 'colony collapse disorder' means that bee-keepers are having to turn down orders and spend months trying to re-build their colonies and breed queen bees.

To give an idea of the importance of bees for pollination, the almond crop in California needs almost half of the honeybees in the United States, that's 1.3 million colonies, but the colony collapse disorder that started in 2006 has meant that there just aren't enough bees to go round.

European bees suffering too
The statistics make for grave reading. According to the USDA Agricultural Research Service beekeepers lost 36.1% of their colonies in 2007, whereas a normal annual loss would be around 5-10%. This trend is apparently rising among European countries, with reports of colony collapse disorder coming from Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Virus or parasite?
Similar issues arose in the 1980s and the winters of 1995-96 and 2000-01. Many of the bee deaths and disappearances was attributed to the influx of deadly varroa and tracheal mites which feast on bees and act as a transporter for diseases. This time though, 25% of the bees deaths cannot be blamed on mites, raising alarm and suspicion that it may be down to pathogens (viruses).

Nicholas Calderone, Professor of Entomology at Cornell University likened it to a natural disaster: "Just like in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster there are a lot of conflicting and inaccurate reports. What we do know is that there are an awful lot of dead bees. We are looking for patterns."

Organic is safe but not part of the issue
Organic bee-keepers are more upbeat, as they claim not to have witnessed the problem of colony depletion. Sharon Labchuk, an organic bee-keeper from the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island said that pesticides and long journeys were to blame for the disappearance of millions of bees: "I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse. The problem with the big commercial setups is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies."

However, organic honey production bucks the trend somewhat, as in order for a colony to be certified as organic, the bees cannot roam onto conventional farms lest they return laden with pesticides and chemicals. They may be making honey that's less contaminated, but they're not necessarily playing a co-dependent role within agri-business.