Modern beekeeping is a strange pursuit, and not just because its practitioners choose to make their living caring for creatures that have poison stingers on their backsides. Bees pollinate our crops and make honey by doing what comes naturally, yet their lives have come to take a very artificial course. As the Colorado-based journalist Hannah Nordhaus writes in her new chronicle of commercial beekeeping, "the age of mass production has not been kind to bees."

The media have swarmed on the story of colony collapse disorder, or CCD, in which bees just disappear from their hives, leaving behind untended honey and a lonely queen. Reporters interested in the spooky malady have often called John Miller, one of the nation's top beekeepers, who jocularly calls the puzzling constellation of symptoms PPB, for "piss-poor beekeeping" (although CCD has hit his colonies too).

Miller proved to be such a good source -- "someone who cared passionately about something strange and had a talent for expressing it" -- that Nordhaus decided to build a book around him. He is the Virgil of the piece, our guide through the nine circles of hell that are modern beekeeping. Miller is a quirky Mormon who writes poetic e-mails, bounces with excitement, and reacts to the stings that come with his job with an effusion of what he calls "cowboy words." And the business is as weird as he is.

If you eat, you should care about the plight of the bees. "One in every three bites of each summer's harvest," Nordhaus says, is pollinated by the tiny billions that make up the rickety, stressed, and decidedly odd bee industry. Commercial bees are jostled, medicated, alternately fed corn syrup and half-starved as they are trucked across the country on annual migrations to pollination opportunities. And their intense concentration every year in the almond fields of California means that bee diseases, from the reddish varroa mites that crawl on their backs to bacterial foulbrood, can spread quickly across the nation's "bee herd."

Scientists are still working out the chain of events that leads to empty hives, but they are unlikely to find a single culprit. Instead, and unsatisfyingly, the phenomenon probably reflects "some sort of interaction between pathogens and variables such as nutrition, weather, varroa mites, pesticides, and the modern insults of long-distance beekeeping," Nordhaus writes. It's understandable, then, that she made her book a character study rather than a whodunit about colony collapse disorder.

CCD is, however, symbolically rich, and Nordhaus not only sees dying bees as "symbols of environmental sin" but uses the image of bees' abandoning their homes to excellent effect as a metaphor for the hollowing out of the Great Plains as farms consolidate and farmers age. Yet before the loss of honeybees, there was another loss, one that, surprisingly, she alludes to only in passing -- that of the wild insects and birds that once did the pollinating in America "but have been driven to near extinction by pesticides and habitat loss."

"Farmers expect bees to function like just another farm machine," Nordhaus writes. "But bees are living things." And it turns out that even bees in boxes need nature to thrive. Researchers are finding that corn syrup or monoculture crops that briefly flower and then disappear won't do for the bee. Bees need "wild meadows, untamed, unsprayed meadows, meadows where flowers flourish all summer in an ever-replenishing weedy bloom." John Miller has recently decided to skip the corn syrup in favor of leaving his bees more of their own honey to tide them over to spring. Modern agriculture may need the bee, but the bee most decidedly does not need modern agriculture.