Samantha,
Thanks for the link. I watched the trailer--very well done--a little dated, but very good.
I've discussed the following subjects previously on this forum, so I'll just list them here:

1) Rudolf Steiner predicted the catastrophic loss of bees in a book back in 1920. His culprit---"modern" bee culture practices, especially requeening.
2) Israeli Acute Paralytic Virus
3) sanitation and the need for sterile technique by professional beekeepers. They may be organic, they may be well-intentioned, but if they haven't taken a college level course in microbiology, they're likely to spread the diseases that harm the bees without knowing what they're doing. If you're going to do this as a business, treat it like one, which in this case means learning the discipline of sterile technique. If you're a beekeeper and you don't know what I'm talking about, FIND OUT.

Thanks for the info!

When man found ways to travel the world, he also found that it spread disease to places that had no defenses. Pack 30 school kids in a classroom with a few of them sick and what happens? Put thousands of hives from all over the country in one place with some that are carrying diseases and what happens? We are our own worst enemies.

Just out of curiosity- to me, I'm getting the impression that smaller beekeepers who do this for a living and stay local (don't pack up and move hives around) are probably better for the bees, rather than commercial beekeepers who pack up the hives and move them to california, texas, florida, michigan, all over the country.

Am I misunderstanding, or is this correct...?

Samantha,
You are right, to a point. I've seen some of my beekeeping neighbors acting even more irresponsibly than the professionals. For example, there is a local fellow who had 100 hives which he kept for a hobby. He lost all of them to CCD, and now he is going around the county collecting wild hives from neighbors' yards to rebuild his colonies. When I offered to give him a wild hive we had captured, I stipulated that he was not to set foot on the property with his own empty hive box until or unless he had properly sterilized the box by burning the inside with a propane torch or disinfecting it with clorox (the clorox is not nearly as good as burning because the bees don't mind a little charred wood smell, but you have to work very hard to get the clorox smell out of the wood after sterilization). When this fellow showed up, I asked him whether he had done as I requested, and he said no, it wasn't necessary, adding that he had been a beekeeper for 50 years and he'd never had to do anything like that before. I told him that times had changed, and reminded him that he had just lost every one of his hives. I threw him off my property, instructed him never to return, telling all my neighbors not to do business with him, because if they did, there was a very high probability that the diseases that killed his bees would spread to their own hives.
So, no, the difference is not between professionals and amateurs so much. The difference is really betweeen educated and uneducated beekeepers.

Nature, my favorite program on PBS is featuring the CCD problem next Sunday, June 15. It may have been on before, but if interested you can check out when it might show in your city.

Here is a link that might be useful: Silence of the bees on Nature