It’s pollen season, honeybee time. Fruit branches ready to pop with blossoms are bending toward hives, asking “Anybody home?”

Good question.

Any day now, trees and bee keepers will know if colony collapse syndrome has struck hives around the South Sound. Judging by national media coverage, the syndrome could be the end of fruit as we know it, not to mention nuts. And honey.

Beekeepers resist such panic. Disaster is nothing new in Bee World.

Even in the best of years, the empty hive is part of the rhythm of apiculture, the science of raising bees. Louis Torre, whose bees thrive in Fife, expects to lose 20 to 30 percent of his hives over a winter. There’s a term for it: the spring dwindle.

But in January, the American Beekeepers Federation began hearing from members who found no one home when they opened their hives to prepare for California’s almond harvest. Fifty to 80 percent of their winged workers were gone. No rotting corpses. No sick bees staggering on the ground. Just emptiness.

The New York Times picked up the story. The loss created a crisis in the groves that depend on bees for pollination. Beekeepers from Georgia to Minnesota rallied to the rescue, sending hives west to work, for a price. The American Beekeepers Federation reported that growers were paying from $85 to $120 for a healthy hive during the season, a 50 percent increase.

The San Francisco Chronicle compared the disappeared swarms to an Agatha Christie mystery: Bees just flying off and vanishing.

The federation asked Congress for $15 million to find out what’s up.

That’s exactly what Louis Torre and 60 other bee people gathered at Washington State University’s Almendinger Center in Puyallup wanted to ask WSU’s bee buff and professor of entomology, W. Steve Sheppard, on Monday.

To answer, Sheppard revisited bee lore, back to the first honey bees brought to the New World by the Pilgrims in 1620.

At the end of World War I, tracheal mites started a death march through the hives of Europe. When a monk, Brother Adam, brought swarms of American bees to replenish the apiary at Buckfast Abbey, the newcomers, who’d never fought off a mite, went pollen-pockets-up in no time.

Over 27 years, European bees evolved into tracheal-mite-resistant pollinating machines and ended the scourge. Time and change, not kerosene, gasoline, mint oil or fresh American bees, did the job.

When tracheal mites made it over here 23 years ago, they, along with their cousins the varroa mites, feasted on bee innards and left wounds where stray fungi and bacteria could do their damage.

But now, evolution’s got a problem. Torre, his fellow beekeeper Dane Stothesbury, and most of the others at the meeting replenish their lost hives with packs containing a fresh queen and three pounds of bees, imported from California for $60 to $75.

The trouble with that, said Sheppard, is that a WSU study found only 473 California queens produced the 869,500 queens shipped out that year. That’s pressure – and a genetic bottleneck.

His team is researching bees that, if imported, from, say, Kazakhstan, might strengthen genetic diversity and produce tough little buzzers and mighty mite fighters. It would also attack the colony collapse problem.

Sheppard is finding mite infestations, weird bacteria and fungi he’s never seen, in weakened hives sent to WSU by Washington growers. He’s checking combs for residues of pesticides and anything else one would not want to find in a drizzle of honey.

Sheppard has a hunch: This might not be a new bee catastrophe. It might be a combination of old ones.

“With the spring dwindle, the rate of bees dying is higher than the rate of new bees being made,” he said.

If mites, germs and a tough winter push winter bee deaths up 10 to 15 percent, dwindle turns to wipeout.

Fingers crossed for the keepers and bees as the hives open.

And if you run into Borat, mention it might be his bees that make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan, and Fife.

Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677

kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com