“Bees may be regarded as superior to the human race in this: that from their own substance they produce another which is useful; while, of all our secretions, there is not one good for anything.” —Voltaire

Honeycomb depicted in Mesolithic Spanish petroglyphs; traces of beeswax on new-stone-age North African pottery; accounts of ancient Assyrian and Macedonian kings embalmed in honey.

Even before the dawn of recorded history, humans bowed to bees. Evidence is tucked into the Old Testament, the canons of Aristophanes, and hieroglyphic accounts of ancient Egypt, where bees were said to have been born from the tears of the sun god Ra himself.

Today, people who obsess about bees, who invest in them, who channel their reverence into architectural motifs, fashion statements, or beauty campaigns, are not breaking the mold so much as tapping into something primitive, innate: the ancient sense that our species has always relied upon theirs.

This dependency isn’t limited to bee products — honey, wax, comb, propolis, royal jelly, protein-rich stinger venom. It acknowledges the bee as agriculture’s enabler: one-third of all food we eat (fruit, vegetable, nut, spice) couldn’t be cultivated without bees to pollinate it.

These modern-day stewards are often first to remind the rest of us: the disappearance of bees isn’t a dystopian sci-fi scenario. Called “colony collapse disorder,” a catch-all term for the little-understood mass extinction of the honeybee, this disappearance is already underway.

Since the 1950s, the number of bee colonies per American hectare is down 90%. Between 2000 and 2014, European honeybee populations fell nearly one-fifth, and in North America, the rate of decline more than doubled that. In recent winters, American beekeepers reported the loss of nearly half of total managed hives.

In some places, bees have already vanished completely.

“As far back as any person I’ve spoken to could remember, there were no bees here at all,” Ricardo Monroe of Great Exuma in the Bahamas says in a short documentary on The Exuma Project. “We’ve been trying to find out, just speaking to people around the island, why there were no bees, but nobody seems to know the answer to that question.”

Savannah, Georgia bee advocate and honey entrepreneur Ted Dennard heard rumors there were beehives on the cay in the mid-20th century, but it had been decades since the last sighting. “We sent out an all-points bulletin: ‘Find bees,’” Dennard says. “People would send pictures: ‘Is this a honeybee? Is this a honeybee?’”

Dennard and colleagues spent, by his estimate, a year vetting suspected sightings, and coming up empty. “There were none,” he recalls. “There just were not.”

Dennard wanted to help bring bees back to this bereft piece of the archipelago. But he and his partners at the Great Exuma Foundation had one make-or-break question to address first: Would they need to contend with Varroa mites?

Varroa destructor, a parasitic arachnid, cousin to the tick, is the honeybee’s arch nemesis. First identified in the Middle East and Asia, these mites gradually made their way to the U.S. in the late 1970s. By the mid-1980s, Varroa had gained ground in several states, thought to spread via the massive commercial beekeeping operations that transport hives via 18-wheelers to pollinate crops from Maine blueberries to California almonds.

Samuel Ramsey, PhD, an entomologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Bee Research Lab in Maryland — known to his YouTube followers as “Dr. Bugs” — said Varroa hitches onto their host’s abdomen and feeds on its insides, and that while these poppy-seed-sized monsters were identified decades ago, there’s still “a lot of misinformation and a lack of info altogether” about them.

Why so little research on something so potentially crippling to human life? Ramsey’s best guess is what he dubbed “Silent Spring Syndrome,” after environmentalist Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 book about pesticides.

“We’re looking for a chemical at the center of every environmental problem,” Ramsey says. “While many news clips [about Colony Collapse Disorder] mention Varroa mites, they’ll spend far more time talking about pesticides, regardless of how many studies say, ‘Guys, you need to be paying more attention to this invasive parasite.’”

To be clear, pesticides do kill bees, he adds: “Who would ever be surprised to find that insecticides, for example, which are intended to kill insects, kill bees. But we’re giving disproportionate weight to one issue, not focusing nearly enough attention on what researchers are calling the key player in honeybee health decline. Regardless of what we keep seeing in hives, we just can’t seem to focus on anything but the pesticides.”

Bees are also dying due to habitat loss, air pollution, climate change, and other factors, he says, but experts suspect Varroa kills more bees than these other causes combined, while the viruses they carry make colonies even more vulnerable to climate- and chemical-related risks.

Some beekeepers have a hands-off attitude about Varroa, guided by the belief that nature can fend for itself. Others — organic, biodynamic beekeepers — are unwilling to bring even science-backed chemical treatments into the mix. Yet others believe that bees fighting their fiercest predator unassisted makes the colony stronger.

But letting bees and mites battle it out without intervention may instead make the mites stronger, Ramsey warns, allowing Varroa to feed, thrive, and spread.

Take Slovenia, where beekeeping is a way of life and a facet of cultural identity, and children grow up navigating swarms, or sliding wooden frames caked in honeycomb out of colorful bee boxes in purpose-built bee houses. Such a large part of the population — one in every 200 citizens — keeps bees, the beekeeper vote is considered a politically influential constituency unto itself. And though Slovenians tend to keep fewer hives than Americans, they tend to monitor them more closely. This combination is proving good for bee business.

There, bees populations aren’t plummeting. Rather, numbers are ticking upwards: The Slovenian Beekeepers Association reports a 2% year-over-year colony increase nationwide. While from 2007 and 2017, bees in the U.S. and the rest of Europe died at alarming rates, Slovenia tracked 57% growth.

Slovenia’s support infrastructure for bee stewardship goes all the way up: The government sponsors training courses that include knowledge and skills to address threats like Varroa infestation. It has also distributed, free of charge, to beekeeping citizenry the necessary supplies (chemicals included) to fend off mites.

If a beekeeper is losing to Varroa, the government buys them out of their failing hives, ending the threat of mite spread and allowing for a fresh start.

Peter Kozmus, who keeps 100 hives in Slovenia’s Julian Alps, lobbied the United Nations for years to establish a World Bee Day. In 2017, he emerged victorious. Annually on May 20, the holiday is intended to raise awareness about the importance of bees — and about the threats they face. Their proactive approach to mites may give them a national advantage, but Kozmus is taking a broader view.

“We do not want World Bee Day to be a celebration because we don’t have anything to celebrate right now,” he told Time magazine last year. “We want to use this day as a tool to inform people that bees are important.”

Back in Savannah, as Dennard and partners formed a plan to transplant bees back to Great Exuma, they engaged a group of entomological researchers who delivered good news: just as the island was barren of bees, they’d detected no trace of the Varroa mite, either.

The team could move on to lesser obstacles: customs permits were no small feat, and finding a private jet pilot willing to fly live cargo across the Caribbean — a dozen boxes of 15,000 or more buzzing bees a piece, some escaping through the metal mesh and flying in frantic figure-eights about the cabin — was just as wild a ride.

But once they landed, unpacked, and rolled out a series of workshops to teach locals of all ages about bees and beekeeping, Dennard says, they saw they’d “hit the bullseye.”

Eight years later, honeybees are found all over Great Exuma. Fifteen beekeepers keep active hives, including Monroe, who turned an initial four hives into fifty and who’s pivoted his career to peddling bee wares under the banner Organic Honey Sanctuary.

And other islands in the archipelago are asking for bees now, too. Chub Cay has adopted one of Great Exuma’s hives; Eleuthera, Cat, and New Providence have hosted workshops.

As long as Varroa stays at bay, Bahamian bees have room to thrive. And where the mites are rampant, stewards of the honeybee are experimenting with all manner of mitigative measures, from bee-strengthening mushroom extracts to mites that fight mites, in order to beat bees’ number-one threat. “Nature is rough,” Dennard says. “But that doesn’t mean there can’t be some kind of balance.”