The U.S commercial honey bee industry has lost a record 36 percent of its colonies so far this year due to a mysterious illness that threatens the future of beekeeping and the health of a variety of important crops, a panel of experts told a House Agriculture subcommittee yesterday.

The honey bee industry is valued at more than $15 billion, with nearly 130 different crops dependent on pollination to grow. With so much at stake, the panel of beekeepers, farmers and scientists stressed the importance of getting to the bottom of what is causing the decline, known as “colony collapse disorder.”

“Congress needs to understand that the problem of a lack of bees needed to pollinate the very foods we consume every day is a real and growing problem that needs to be studied, addressed and corrected,” Robert Edwards, a farmer from North Carolina, told the Horticulture Subcommittee. “Bees are as important to our crops as the water and sunshine.”

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Worry is a chronic condition here as a new hurricane season brews in the Atlantic. The concern is amplified by grim descriptions of Florida’s public insurance program and predictions that the experiment could sink with the homes it insures when the next big storm strikes the state with the nation’s riskiest coastlines.

“The reality is, we’re one major hurricane away from being broke,” warned U.S. Rep. Tim Mahoney, a Florida Democrat who believes climate change is threatening his state and others with stronger storms and wants the federal government to become the final backstop against devastating losses.

Owned by the state, Citizens Property Insurance Corp. is now the largest insurer in Florida, with 1.2 million policyholders. It was created in 2002 to write the riskiest policies along the state’s 1,200-mile coastline after private insurers retreated from rising damages.

The Mediterranean Sea, says Francesco Ferretti, is “a very dangerous place for a shark.”

The North Pole may be completely ice-free later this summer as global warming melts Arctic ice, according to scientists.

Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said the ice retreated to a record level last September, opening up the Northwest Passage, a sea route through the Arctic Ocean, for the first time in recorded history. They said there is a 50-50 chance the thin ice could completely melt away at the geographic North Pole by this September.

Afghanistan’s snow leopards have barely survived three decades of war. But now the few remaining mountain leopards left in Afghanistan face another threat — foreigners involved in rebuilding the war-torn country.

Reeling in a 45-pound grouper used to be just an average day on the water in the Florida Keys.

The real life exotic fish from the animated film Finding Nemo could become an endangered species because so many children want them as pets.

With fuel costs soaring and the economy tanking, the skies haven’t been very friendly lately to the airline industry.

The atmosphere is about to become even more hostile as the European Union puts its finishing touches on a plan to regulate international air transport emissions as part of a strategy to curb climate change.

Under the European Commission’s proposal, regulators would cap carbon dioxide emissions from airplanes, forcing airlines to either reduce emissions or purchase pollution credits for every ton of CO2 that exceeds E.U. limits. But U.S. airlines, the Bush administration and members of Congress from both parties say Europe’s plan violates international law, ignores civil aviation rules and ultimately could drive an already-struggling industry to a bust.

The first vote at this year’s International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting has resulted in defeat for Greenland’s request to expand its hunt.

Many countries were unconvinced that Greenlanders need the extra meat that catching 10 humpbacks would provide, and believe the hunt is too commercial.

A Greenland delegate said the decision would deprive its indigenous Inuit communities of much needed whale meat.

Between 20 percent and 40 percent of species are likely to go extinct in the next century if global warming continues at its current rate — which means that wildlife managers will soon be in the business of choosing which ones to save.

That’s the message that members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change passed on Tuesday to attendees at a two-day conference on natural resource management in Boise, Idaho. In relatively short order, species may no longer be able to live in refuges set up to protect them, meaning that officials will need to learn how to predict which places it will be necessary for them to protect in a warming world.

And to do that, they need to make it possible for animals and plants to travel in a landscape increasingly fragmented by human development. Sometimes, there won’t be enough species-preservation resources to go around, requiring a degree of environmental triage, sometimes without all the necessary information — a “new conservation paradigm” of resource management, according to Jean Brennan, a climate scientist with Defenders of Wildlife.