PHILADELPHIA -- In 30 years of beekeeping, Bob Berthold had seen nothing like it.
In August, he was quietly tending 20 healthy bee colonies on the Doylestown, Pa., campus of Delaware Valley College of Science and Agriculture, where he teaches. The colonies were home to about 1.2 million honeybees.
Three months later, a million of those bees were gone.
"It's like someone just sucked them out with a vacuum," said Berthold.
Evidently they were wiped out by a plague of mites that has decimated the nation's honeybee population.
Although it will be hard to measure, those mites may end up taking their toll on consumers in the form of higher prices for honey, apples, cranberries, blueberries and other goods.
Across the northern United States, about 750,000 honeybee colonies -- 60 percent or more of the total -- have been destroyed, said Roger Morse, a professor of agriculture with Cornell University. That may mean as many as 45 billion honeybees.
About 60 percent of New Jersey's honeybee colonies were lost during the past several months. So, too, were up to 75 percent of Pennsylvania's.
No hard numbers were available, but the percentages for wild, or feral, bees lost to the plague probably are even higher.
Those losses likely will hurt many small and midsize farms (not to mention home gardeners) that rely on wild bees to pollinate their plants.
Experts blame two blood-sucking mites that have targeted honeybees, which are important for crop pollination.
One, a microscopic tracheal mite that entered the country in 1984, lodges in the hair-thin breathing tubes of adult bees.
The second, a deadly verroa mite that is the size of a pinhead, arrived in 1987. With its piercing and sucking parts, it feeds on developing and adult bees, weakening and deforming them.
Why the mites have targeted honeybees, as opposed to other species such as bumblebees, carpenter bees and yellow jackets, is a mystery, experts say.
The mite devastation has escalated in recent months, and that is probably related to the record drought of last summer and wintry weather that lasted from Halloween to Easter.
The drought cut bees' food supplies heading into the winter, and the cold and wet winter was unfavorable for foraging.
"Everything sort of came together this past year," said Hachiro Shimanuki, research leader for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
