Thousands of people in the Northeast region have become beekeepers but, by most people, bees are largely misunderstood and hugely under-appreciated. Most people know bees pollinate flowers but most don’t know that every third bite of food you take is the work of the humble honeybee.

Warwick native and biologist Elizabeth Capaldi-Evans hopes to change our perception of bees with her book, Why Do Bees Buzz? Fascinating Answers to Questions about Bees published by Rutgers University Press.

One of the big questions Capaldi-Evans and other bee specialists have been asked lately has been the collapse of numberless colonies of bees throughout the world. Most people would agree that the decline is an unfortunate thing. For farmers and people who understand bees, it is much more than unfortunate and is verging on a disaster of vast significance. If the bees do not survive, wide spread famine would prevail. As more people become aware of the calamitous effects of a bee-less world, the more they want to hear from experts like Capaldi-Evans.

The current concern about “colony collapse disorder” has been a two-edged sword as far as Capaldi-Evans is concerned. The death of the bees is becoming a universal fear as the news of their population collapse has spread near and far. Literally billions of bees have died over the past few years and everyone would like to have it understood and then stopped.

“The collapse has at least hit the media and made people aware of how important bees are,” said Capaldi-Evans, a 1986 graduate of Toll Gate High School, “and more biologists are studying the problem, but what they have learned is not very satisfying in terms of solving the problem. They have discovered that there is no single cause for the collapse.”

A large part of the problem is the way farming has become such a huge enterprise, with single crops spread over vast areas of land. It has prompted big farms to employ “migratory bees” to pollinate the crops. The term, migratory bees has nothing to do with bees just up and going somewhere for a season. They are moved against their will, so to speak, to areas where there is a need for extra pollinators.

“There are beekeepers who transport large trailers of bees around the country at different times of the year,” said Capaldi-Evans. She said the trailers usually move north with the spring and summer and are squatted where they can do the most good for the farmers who grow acres and acres of the same crop.

“If they are growing almonds, for instance, all the bees get is almonds to feed on and it is not good for bees to feed on just one crop,” said Capaldi-Evans. “It’s not good for anyone to eat the same thing all the time.”

But the stress of single feeding and moving around weakens colonies. Capaldi-Evans said raisers of migratory bees make what are called “primary colonization contracts” to provide bees a given part of the season. Farmers pay by the colony, so it’s more profitable to transport them in large numbers. But now, even that is becoming more expensive, from both an economic and ecological standpoint. Aside from putting the bees under stress, moving large numbers of colonies around requires fuel for the trucks, and as oil prices rise, migratory beekeepers and the farmers who use them have to think about restoring natural colonies of bees in areas where they were once found in abundance. But, as the human population moved off of farms and into cities and suburbs, beekeeping as an everyday activity retreated into a hobby for a few people. Beekeeping used to be a much more common activity.

“Boy Scouts could actually earn a badge for beekeeping,” said Capaldi-Evans. It is the concentration of bees in one area that allow the spread of disease and other conditions that kill off colonies. Viruses, molds and parasites have all conspired to kill the bees and that makes it hard to control the collapse.

Diversity, in short, has sacrificed for factory beekeeping, so to speak, where a single family of honeybees is used. Hives that are kept too close to each other allow a problem to quickly spread among the population. Capaldi-Evans said the only recent ray of hope is the proliferation of beekeeping club and organization that are supplying small but diverse colonies all over the suburbs, where the bees get to feed on a larger variety of plants.

“Honeybees are designed to feed on all kinds of plants,” said Capaldi-Evans, “from apples and peas and oranges and just about any other flower.”

Bees used to get their natural diversity by the domestic economy of many people keeping bees for honey and wax. Capaldi-Evans said that every honeybee in America is an immigrant from Europe or Asia.

“There are no native honeybees on this continent,” she said. “They were all brought here by white settlers who were used to having bees.”

Threatening these biological immigrants is as harmful to humans as colony collapse is to the bees.

Capaldi-Evans is an associate professor of biology and animal behavior at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and teaches students about bees and their relation to everything else in the living world but she also roams far afield of the college to give lectures and talks to beekeepers.

“I do a lot of talks with beekeeper clubs,” she said. “Among other things I am an advocate and an educator about bees and I am very thankful to Moe Blais for that teacher influence on me.”

So how did a kid from Warwick become the “Joanny Appleseed” of bees, and become confident enough to call her mentor “Moe” instead of Mr. Blais? She credits that science teacher with sparking her interest in biology.

“Maurice Blais was responsible for a lot of it,” she said. “He inspired me to go into science and teaching.”

But before you begin to picture young Elizabeth Capaldi as a classic nerd, you have to know she was well known in the orchestra and the jazz band and was editor of the yearbook. She wasn’t much interested in sports but she did make her mark in high school.

“My name was in your paper a number of times for the other things I was doing,” she said.

She says she took a lot of college preparatory courses at Toll Gate and did well enough to get into Trinity College in Hartford after she graduated from high school in 1986. She went to graduate school at Michigan State and then on to the job at Bucknell, where she has been for the last 10 years. Her parents still live in Rhode Island and she frequently visits them in Wakefield.

Ironically, since before Capaldi-Evans left Warwick to learn more about insects and bees, Roger Robitaille, a carpenter who lives in the Nausauket section of the city was using his seven acres of land to raise bees - and not just as a hobby either. He maintains between 30 and 40 hives and sells local honey and wax. Obviously, Robitaille loves bees, but it is unusual for a suburban homeowner to profit significantly by keeping bees. One reason for that is that, while he was raising his bees for the last 30 or so years, Robitaille amassed a great deal of lore and learning about bees. He has become the area’s go-to-guy for answers to bee problems, especially where they are unwanted.

“I removed a 12-foot comb from the wall of the Warwick Grange on West Shore Road,” said Robitaille. “A church in Cranston called me about a 15-foot hive. That was only one problem the church had. The termite damage was so bad, you would expect the building to just fall down…but that’s another story. As far as bees go, I come and get the bee swarms into a box and take them home or sell them.”

Robitaille is pleased to say that interests in bees has grown to the point where it’s worth his while to sell bees to amateur beekeepers all over southwest New England. As far as neighbors go, most of Robitaille’s know how important it is to have bees around for their gardens and are very tolerant toward his gently behaving bees.

“I once had a neighbor complain that I had a hive too close to his pool and the bees were bothering people using the pool, so I moved it and that solved that problem,” he said and remarked that, “Bees love to go around swimming pools and drink from the shallow puddles around the edge. For some reason, they like the chlorinated water.”

Robitaille said he has been giving talks to bees clubs more than ever lately, telling people how to keep them and reap the many benefits of the work bees do for us.

“I save everything,” he said, “the honey, the wax, all of it. I do make a little profit.”

The only thing Robitaille is concerned about lately is how people often take down trees that are good for bees and honey, like black locust, which is a large source of the honey Robitaille sells.

“I hate to see someone cut down a really nice tree, like maple or basswood,” he said. “You can do whatever you want with an oak tree but leave the good trees.”

Capaldi-Evan’s book, which she wrote with writer Carol A. Butler, comes out this month and should be available at local bookstores. Inquiries about Why Bees Buzz: Fascinating Answers to Questions about Bees can be addressed to www.rutgerspress.rutgers.edu. For more about beekeeping, visit www.ribeekeeper.org. Roger Robitaille can be reached at 732-6599.