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Last winter, about a third of the world's honeybees disappeared. Nobody knows why. They're still disappearing.

Here's how scary this is: Nearly 80 per cent of humanity's food supply depends on pollinators such as honeybees, and most of the food North Americans eat depends on them. Even the dairy industry is heavily dependent on plants that won't grow without bees. And there is no substitute for the honeybee.

The calamity has been blamed on globalization, pollution, pesticides, crop monoculture, UFOs, viruses, mites, bacteria, global warming and a fungus. Most beekeepers blame the pesticide Imidacloprid, but hardly any scientists do. There are even some oddball Christians who say it's a sign of the end times, foretold in Revelations.

• Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, by Rowan Jacobsen, Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $25. Also reviewed here: Bees: Nature's Little Wonders, by Candace Savage, GreyStone, 128 pages, $28

The French call it Mad Bee Disease. It's commonly called Colony Collapse Disorder, and it's not even certain when or where the trouble began. Something inexplicable was going on at least three years ago, and some say it started in Israel, while others say it started in Australia. For a while, organic farmers were boasting that their beehives were fine. Then organic beekeepers started losing their hives, too.

In Fruitless Fall, U.S. environmental writer Rowan Jacobsen sets out in search of the disappearing bees, and along the way he corners the entomologists, epidemiologists and geneticists working on the case. He visits shell-shocked beekeepers, tracks the rapid transformation and eventual crash of the honey industry, and surveys a dystopian ecology which, Jacobsen convincingly argues, was destined to produce a disaster like this, no matter what the specific cause turns out to be.

It wasn't that long ago that the North American landscape was a honeybee idyll, a patchwork of farm, field and town, with diversified economies and fairly localized and varied food production and distribution systems. Now it's all cities, clear-cuts and monoculture, pesticide-dependent food crops.

In a globalized economy, there's no such thing as a purely localized problem, and whatever it is that's carrying off all the honeybees, no plague can be adequately quarantined any longer, and no pathogen will simply burn itself out without becoming a global prairie fire first. Natural selection no longer weeds out the bad, quickly and efficiently. Everything is connected, and if something comes apart, there's a good chance it will bring the roof down on everyone.

“ Each chapter of Fruitless Fall reads like a script from The X-Files, with all the drama, colourful characters and macabre plot twists ”

Systems like that are notoriously precarious, brittle and vulnerable to shock, so something like this was bound to happen to honeybees, Jacobsen argues. While he is properly skeptical of the doom-wallahs, Jacobsen is still quite grim in his prognosis. At a minimum, we should all count on our food getting a lot more monochromatic, dreary and expensive. "It will undoubtedly get a lot worse than it is today," Jacobsen writes. "But out of that wreck, more resourceful and resilient bees will emerge."

Solving the bee mystery has been especially confounding because it began like a murder investigation without a body. The bees just flew away and didn't come back, and the few bees left behind in the abandoned hives just wandered around aimlessly, as if they'd all gone senile. Even when dead bees did start turning up, investigators were no further ahead. "The bees didn't have one disease," Jacobsen writes. "They had them all."

When you're dealing with something as complicated as the ecology and social organization of bees, as well as something as elaborately interconnected as the global food economy, the villain could be any number of perturbations. It could be working alone or in combination, within dozens of feedback loops, synergies, inter-species relationships and interactions.

Each chapter of Fruitless Fall reads like a script from The X-Files, with all the drama, colourful characters and macabre plot twists. But it is assiduously researched, and what Jacobsen first notices is that long before honeybee colonies started collapsing, the North American honey industry had all but collapsed.

In little more than a decade, flotillas of deep-sea tankers carrying vast loads of enzymatically processed, half-syrup honey analogues and cheap-labour honey from China, India and Argentina had ruined North American honey producers, capturing three-quarters of the North American market.

Just one of the many stops Jacobsen makes in his travels is the Groeb Farms complex in Florida. Groeb is one of the world's biggest honey wholesalers. In a warehouse, Jacobsen encounters a giant wall, five metres high, constructed of roughly 1,000 bright green drums, each containing about 250 kilograms of Chinese honey. Groeb ships 1,000 kilograms of honey, each day. A short drive from the Groeb complex, Jacobsen visits the decaying ruins of the Horace Bell Honey Company. Horace Bell was once the largest U.S. honey wholesaler, running 40,000 hives. In the Horace Bell warehouses, there are barrels of unsold honey, even now.

North America's beekeepers have come to survive mainly from the fees they earn by trucking thousands of hives around the continent in convoys of flatbed trucks, providing pollination services to apple farmers, pumpkin farmers, blueberry farmers and sunflower growers. Overshadowing all of this is the California almond industry.

Without California almonds, there would be nothing left of the U.S. honeybee industry. Without bees, there would be no almonds. California's almonds now account for more than 80 per cent of the world's supply, and while the rise of almonds has paralleled the decline of the bees, it's gotten so that the beekeepers' almond profits are required to offset their losses in providing bees to other food crop producers, who have been hurt by import competition just as badly as honey producers. That's the way the treadmill turns.

Now, there simply aren't enough bees to pollinate North America's food crops, and no one knows where the bees are going to come from, because colonies are collapsing in Europe, Asia, South America and Australia, too.

Because of its vigorous inquiry into the troubled ecology of modern agriculture's keystone species, Jacobsen's contribution is far more serious and engaging than Candace Savage's whimsical Bees: Nature's Little Wonders. To her credit, however, Savage presents a more expansive and lyrical account of what has been called the "wisdom of the hive": The complex social organization, assembly-line division of labour and intricately precise dance-ritual communication that domesticated bees employ as they go about the business of propping up modern civilization.

And yes, upon returning to the hive, scout bees really do report their findings to their fellow bugs, in precise detail, by dancing. Encoded in their movements are the directions to flowering trees and water sources: the distance from the hive, the direction to fly in order to get there and how much bounty to expect on arrival. Savage also helpfully recounts the story of pioneering scientists Karl von Frisch and Martin Lindauer, and the twists and turns of their lifelong effort to reveal the elaborate life of bees to a disbelieving world.

Published in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, Bees may be the sort of book you will find in the bathroom at a cozy bed-and-breakfast establishment in cottage country, but it is nonetheless a useful and delightful little book, lushly illustrated and complemented by sidebars containing poems, bits of folklore and so on.

But if it's depth, heft, tireless research and an engrossing story you're after, Jacobsen's Fruitless Fall is by far the sweeter of the two.

Terry Glavin is a journalist and author. His most recent book is Waiting for the Macaws: And Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions.