I'm a novice bee-keeper, having only had two hives before. Both were doing well but were lost to natural events. The first was lost to a blizzard (snow buried the hive) and the second was eaten by bears last fall.

We bought our new bees as "packages": ten-thousand bees, a new queen, totally knock'd-up, in a cage, and a sugar water feeder all in a wood and screen box. Installing is easy. Open the hive, attach the queen cage to a frame, dump the bees out of the package (~5 lbs of bees) into the hive, set up the feeder, and close it all back again. A day later, open the hive, replace the cork that keeps the queen in cage with something she can eat through - a mini marshmallow - and hope that the bees have gotten used to their new hive overlord and don't eat her straight away.

The delivery was late this year because of the weather. The apiary we bought from lost about 25% of their hives over the winter. Here's a local news story about where we picked up our bees:

http://kdvr.com/2013/05/04/coloradans-try-to-protect-honey-bees-from-dying-of-mysterious-sickness/

Helping bees is only one of many reasons that we have hives. Mrs P. likes her garden full of bees and they like her garden full of many kinds of flowers. The small amount of honey we've harvested is just a tithe they pay for rent; we never take more than ten percent. We like them to winter with their own stash and to not have to feed them unless we have to. But damn, our garden distilled into honey is the best in the world. And honeybees are cool. I just stand there and watch them do their thing.

Naturally, I've been following the CCD problem. I agree that there many factors. Pesticides are a problem, especially the systemic ones, and we as a culture over-use them. Commercial bee hives live a difficult life, traveling from coast to coast to pollinate different crops. That alone is a stressor. Hives that have all of their honey harvested live on sugar water over the winter, and usually high-fructose corn syrup instead of sugar. But honey is more than sugar. There are lots of enzymes, amino acids, and all sorts of nutrients that bees need to stay healthy. And crops these days are mainly mono-culture, acres after acre of the same old flowers.

Apparently, this has happened before. From The Bug Girl, a different look at the problem.

Get me started on bees, I'll be typing all afternoon...