Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe

from the Guardian. I like to avoid sensational headlines and articles, but sometimes one simply can't.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.