(April 1, 2011) — “I have all kinds of fruit trees — pomegranate, peach, sweet lemons,” senior Lilit Galstyan said, “and I’ve realized that there is less and less fruit every year, especially with my peach tree.” While many people, both students and adults, hate bees, seeing them as a threat, bees only sting when they feel threatened, according to Pal Beach County Beekeepers. “I don’t hate bees, but I’m really scared of being stung by one,” Galstyan said. Bees make a huge contribution to the foods we eat, which explains our dependence on them. However they are are dying off in huge numbers. According to ABC News, 32% collapsed in 2007, 36% in 2008, and almost 29% in 2009. “A third of America’s food depends on plants pollinated by bees and other insects,” according to ABC News writer Ned Potter, and if the number of bees continues to plummet at this rate, food costs are bound to increase. The mysterious disappearance of bee colonies, called colony collapse disorder (CCD), has left many scientists and farmers baffled. Honeybees provide $15 billion worth of benefits to U.S. farmers by pollinating crops that end up in our markets, according to Time magazine. “If bees die, we die,” senior John Quiros said, “because they produce honey and fertilize many of our foods.” Scientists are researching the cause of CCD, but even with Department of Agriculture’s $200 billion-a-year investment towards researching CCD, Time magazine writer Bryan Walsh says the mystery is yet to be solved. Another cause could include cellphone radio waves. Andrew Goldsworthy, a British biologist, told CNN that cellphone radiation affects the pigment cryptochrome, which bees use to navigate, thus hindering their ability to find their hives. However, Norman Carreck, scientific director of the International Bee research Association, says that we cannot conclude that radio waves are affecting bees due to lack of knowledge about honey bees’ use of the earth’s magnetic field in navigation. Research has helped in determining possible factors causing CCD, but no one origin can be pinpointed. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “dead bees don’t necessarily mean CCD.” One mystery behind this phenomenon is the missing bodies of dead bees. Piles of dead bees near a hive usually are the result of acute pesticide poisoning, not a sign of CCD. “I’ve heard that it’s a fungus that killing the bees en masse,” science teacher Virginia Benzer said, but studies conducted by different agencies have led researchers to surmise that it’s a combination of different factors leading to the decline of bees. “Bees are major pollinators, pollinating a lot of food crops that we need, and without them, we could have a major shortage in food supplies which definitely means higher food prices,” Benzer said. Without Earth’s natural pollinators, many farmers will have to find other ways to keep yielding crops. “Nature is the best pollinator,” Benzer said, “and if there aren’t enough bees, we’ll need to find some means of artificial pollination, which definitely wouldn’t be as effective.”