SHERMAN, TX -- After we received an e-mail about a bunch of pesky bees buzzing around one Texoma home, we looked into the matter. We found out, while having bees around my lead to a sting, not having them around could be much worse.

"They are wonderful, wonderful little creatures," says Michele Crouse, a local Bee Keeper.

The all important but often overlooked honey bee.
Brought to the New World in the 1600's the honey bees are world renowned for their work effort, at least some of them are.

"The female bees are the only ones who do any work, so in the winter time, they drag all of the male bees out, so they don't have to feed them," said Crouse.

Everybody knows that bees make honey, an almost perfect foodstuff that never goes bad, plus it is fat cholesterol and salt free.

What everybody may not know is that the honey doesn't always taste the same.

"It depends on what kind of flowers they pull the pollen off as to what kind of taste you are going to get," said Crouse.

But making honey isn't nearly as important as the other sevice bees provide.

"They pollinate 3/4 of the species of plants world wide," said Dr. Steven Goldsmith, Dean of Sciences at Austin College

That means without bees 75 percent of the plants on planet earth couldn't reproduce.

In 2006 biologists, ecologists, and bee keepers alike began to notice a chilling trend. Bees were disappearing in large numbers worldwide.

"35 to 40 percent of managed honey bee colonies died out over that period of time," said Goldsmith.

Scientists began calling the case of the missing bees, colony collapse, and they are still trying to figure out what is causing the decline in bee populations.

While colony collapse hasn't been identified in Texoma, people should still avoid killing honey bees whenever possible, because in the end...

"We need the bugs more than they need us," Goldsmith said.