Each October, when the mountain wind begins to carry a hint of winter chill, Lyle Johnston of Rocky Ford, Colo., loads hundreds of wooden boxes containing a special cargo onto flatbed trucks. He wants those trucks and their valuable cargo–30 million honeybees per truck–to be well down the road on their way to California before the season’s wintry blasts sweep through the Rockies.

The bees are destined to be put to work pollinating the almond fields of California, the source of more than half of the world’s almond. Johnston relies on the almond industry, and the almond industry relies on him and his fellow beekeepers. “Without the bees, the growers get only 300 to 400 pounds of almonds per acre,” says Johnston. “With good hives, they get 2,200 to 2,800 pounds per acre.”

American farmers rent honeybees to pollinate almonds, apples, melons, and more than a dozen other crops, raising the value of agricultural production more than $14 billion per year, say entomologists at Cornell University.

Even so, the honeybee industry is dwindling. “It’s a tough game right now,” says Johnston, a third-generation beekeeper whose grandfather started the business in 1908. Bees are declining in number, largely because of the destructive efficiency of parasitic mites and American foulbrood, a bacterial disease that infects the young bee larvae and is killing off bee colonies across the nation.

Currently, there are no drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat the blood-sucking Varroa mites or the suffocating tracheal mites, and the one FDA-approved drug to treat American foulbrood is more than 40 years old. “Consequently, the bacteria have become resistant to treatment across large parts of the United States,” says Mark Feldlaufer, Ph.D., research leader at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md.

But through the efforts of the Beltsville Bee Research Lab, the FDA, and a national research program called the USDA Minor Use Animal Drug Program, two more antibiotics to treat foulbrood may soon be available, and studies of a drug to treat Varroa mites will soon begin.