Did anybody hear about the bees? This frightens me alot

[TZ]

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (Reuters) -- A mysterious disease is killing off U.S. honeybees, threatening to disrupt pollination of a range of crops and costing beekeepers hundreds of thousands of dollars, industry experts said on Monday.

Beekeepers in 22 states have reported losses of up to 80 percent of their colonies in recent weeks, leaving many unable to rent the bees to farmers of crops such as almonds and, later in the year, apples and blueberries.

"It's unusual in terms of the widespread distribution and severity," said Jerry Bromenshenk, a professor at the University of Montana at Missoula and chief executive of Bee Alert Technology, a company monitoring the problem.
Dave Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper who reported the so-called Colony Collapse Disorder to researchers at Pennsylvania State University in November, said he had lost about 2,000 hives, which can each contain around 50,000 bees during the summer months.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/02/12/bees.reut/index.html
Basically I heard that native honeybees have something like AIDS where they seem to have no immunity from anything and so are dying off from many different problems.
Worrysome for several reasons: one we get a lot of our fruit crops from bee pollination done with these bees. Also what guarantee do we have that whatever is making these bees so sick is not harmful to us as well. Along with all the mysterious bird deaths and such, this really is frightening to me.