He returned a few weeks later to check on the hives. As he pumped smoke into the hives to calm the bees—a common practice among beekeepers— Hackenberg became aware of a strange, dead silence. Anyone who’s ever been around hundreds of beehives knows how loud the buzzing can be. He opened the first hive, then the others. In every one, the adult bees were gone. Vanished. Their newly hatched brood abandoned.

Hackenberg’s first thought was that he’d done something wrong. The same line of thinking initially kept other beekeepers from coming forward with similar experiences. But something felt different. Not only were the bees gone, no dead bees could be found anywhere. In 40 years of beekeeping, he’d never seen anything like it.

“I got on the phone and started asking questions,” he says. “ I called beekeepers, inspectors, and scientists all over the country. I made so many calls that our cell service provider called to apologize for a billing error. They told my wife it had to be an error; I'd surpassed the 5,000-minute monthly limit—that’s 83 hours in one month, talking on the phone.”

But many credit Hackenberg’s persistence, as well as his stature in the beekeeping industry, for getting things moving. His calls eventually brought him to the College of Agricultural Science’s Diana Cox-Foster in November 2006.