"Nature: Silence of Bees," Oct. 28, PBS

NEW YORK (CNS) -- "If bees continue to disappear at the current rate, honeybee populations in the United States will cease to exist by the year 2035."

That's the frightening prediction that ends the fast-moving and genuinely important documentary narrated by F. Murray Abraham, airing Sunday, Oct. 28, 8-9 p.m. EDT on PBS stations as the season premiere of the "Nature" series (check local listings).

You might think twice about flinching at a bee's appearance at the family picnic when you hear the statistics about the mysterious global disappearance of these vital creatures, a devastating phenomenon that could cause a crisis of enormous proportions.

Is it pesticides, parasites, malnutrition, an AIDS-like virus, or perhaps a combination of all these factors? Scientists are still perplexed.

The future of our food supply rests on the tiny honey bee. They are the most important pollinator on the planet, accounting for one-third of our fruits, vegetables, seeds and fibers, like cotton.

And yet, as many as 70 percent of honey bees have disappeared within the last six months in certain areas of the U.S. The monetary value of these invaluable workers is about $14 billion in the U.S. Without them, we'd be reliant on only wind-pollinated crops, like corn, wheat and rice.

The program travels the globe to investigate the frightening trend labeled colony collapse disorder, and it, as some suggest, may be a crisis bigger and more immediate than global warming.

There's a blueberry manufacturer in Maine, where a commercial beekeeper distributes bees -- $100 a hive -- to blueberry flowers. But these beekeepers, so essential to the process, are finding their bees dying off in huge numbers.

Featuring interviews with scientists, beekeepers and farmers, revelatory close-up photography, and computerized illustrations showing the workings of what one speaker refers to as a "magnificent little engineered thing," the program gives us a comprehensive, perhaps definitive, look at how bees work.

In France, it would appear pesticides played a big role, impacting the bees' ability to learn and compromising their immune system.

In Andalusia, Spain, malnutrition is a prime suspect, or else an infectious parasite. Or both.

There's a particularly fascinating sequence about pear orchards in China where humans must laboriously pollinate manually. Bees disappeared in the 1980s because of the uncontrolled use of pesticides, so now hundreds of workers must apply pollen blossom by blossom.

Near the end of the hour, there's a revelation that the virus may have been brought in from Melbourne, Australia, in the form of packaged bees. But this eureka-moment is far from conclusive as, again, the virus is only part of the problem.

"This is like CSI for agriculture," observes a Columbia University researcher. CSI stands for crime scene investigation.

And this program, produced by Partisan Pictures and Thirteen/WNET, is just as compelling

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