Milligram for milligram, honeybees may be Hawaii’s costliest export, far outpacing macadamia nuts or Kona coffee, but their role in the nation’s food chain remains largely hidden.

"They’re very valuable," said Danielle Downey, the state’s apiculture, or beekeeping, specialist. "Each queen bee goes for $17 to $25. For a little insect, that’s a pretty big deal."

Hawaii is one of the top queen bee producers in the world, a function that is growing more crucial with the collapse of honeybee colonies across the country. But the queens are in such demand that there is no need to advertise, so few people know about them.

"We are an agricultural business that’s always been kept under the radar," said beekeeper Michael Krones, owner of Hawaiian Queen Co. in Captain Cook on Hawaii island. "We take advantage of the weather conditions and the fact that Hawaii has a very good postal system."

Queen honeybees travel in style, packed in individual containers, each with a handful of worker bees to tend to them. Although data are scarce, an estimated 400,000 queens make the move each year from the sunny hillsides of Kona where they got their start in life to the U.S. mainland, Canada and elsewhere.

Their mission: to buttress the ranks of bees that pollinate crops, from the vast almond orchards of California to the cranberry bogs of New England. Weighing in at about 170 milligrams, the queen honeybee is the mother of the hive, laying all the eggs. That puts her in big demand these days, both here and on the mainland.

"Because of the publicity about disappearing bees, we’ve gone from a public nuisance to a public treasure," mused Gus Rouse, owner of Kona Queen Hawaii Inc., the state’s largest queen bee exporter. "People used to just say, keep those bees out of here. And now I have people calling up saying, I would like to have bees on the property.’"

While a few crops, such as wheat and corn, are pollinated by wind, a huge variety of fruits, nuts and plants rely on honeybees for pollination. Even cattle are tied to the honeybee, which pollinates alfalfa. In Hawaii, farm gate sales of produce that depends on bees are pegged at $212 million a year.

"Honeybees, through pollination, are responsible for about one out of every three bites of food an American takes," Rouse said. "The ramifications are far-reaching. You take the bees out of the picture, and we’re all eating gruel."

The Aloha State supplies roughly 30 percent of the North American market for queen bees, according to Downey, who was president of the Apiary Inspectors of America last year. Hawaii has just three major queen breeders, all in Kona, and agriculture officials do not divulge their data due to confidentiality restrictions. But two breeders agreed to disclose their numbers to the Star-Advertiser.

Russell Olivarez, location manager for Big Island Queens, said he raises about 120,000 queens a year, while Krones said his Hawaiian Queen Co. rears 30,000 to 40,000 in a good year. They each estimated that the dominant player in the market, Kona Queen Hawaii Inc., ships 250,000 to 300,000 annually. Rouse, Kona Queen’s owner, would say only that his company produces "as many as we can."

"Hawaii is one of the largest producers of queen bees in the world," said Darcy Oishi, biological control section chief for the state Department of Agriculture. "There are producers in Louisiana, California and elsewhere, and some of them are substantial, but Hawaii has a strong advantage. We have a year-round growing period, which is something that honestly no one else can compete with."

Across the nation, beekeepers have been losing close to a third of their hives each year over the past few years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, prompting concentrated efforts to track down causes and combat the trend. The decline is attributed to a number of factors, including pesticide use, disease, parasites and habitat issues.

"The queens that we send from Hawaii are sustaining the rebuilding that’s a consequence of all these collapsing colonies," Downey said.

With its array of flowering plants, Hawaii has long been a paradise for honeybees. But the arrival of the varroa mite, first found on Oahu in 2007, and the small hive beetle in 2010 has darkened that landscape. The insidious pests have devastated wild colonies as well as managed hives on Oahu and Hawaii island, pushing up production costs for honey as well as queen bees.

"We have a harder job in front of us to keep our bees healthy, but we still manage to do it," said Olivarez, who came to Hawaii island from California several years ago for its clean environment for queen-rearing, then faced not just mites but beetles. "You’ve just got to be diligent and work hard. Reconstituting dead hives is now part of the equation."

Breeding and rearing queens is a labor-intensive undertaking that blends art and science, requiring intuition and ingenuity. It takes three weeks to produce a queen, a delicate process repeated over and over with thousands of miniature hives. Breeders trick worker bees into thinking they don’t have a queen, so the bees will raise a new one by feeding a larva exclusively on "royal jelly," secreted from glands on their heads. Without that protein-rich diet, the larva would become just another worker bee.

Kona has the ideal climate for queen-rearing, with plenty of sunshine and little wind, plus lots of undeveloped land. Kona Queen, which has 30 year-round employees, has its beehives in 85 different locations, through arrangements with gracious landowners, Rouse said.

A state apiary program to improve honeybee health was established in 2009 with funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It works with small hobbyists as well as big exporters, educating beekeepers and the public, conducting surveys, combating the spread of pests, inspecting hives and certifying queens as clean for shipment. Gov. Neil Abercrombie signed legislation last year to make the apiary program permanent, but it doesn’t have a funding mechanism yet. The federal funds run out in July 2013.

Hawaii beekeepers used to collect wild queens to supplement their stocks, but those are hard to find these days. Ironically, although Hawaii is a big queen exporter, local beekeepers are often short of queens. The major queen breeders first fill their longstanding contracts with big mainland customers, and demand exceeds supply.

"There are others that are beginning to do queen-rearing on a small scale in other parts of the state," Oishi said. "It won’t ever be in the same class as that occurring in Kona."

Michael Kliks, president of the Hawai‘i Beekeepers’ Association and owner of Manoa Honey Co., has reared his own queens in the past but calls it a painstaking job that requires specialization. He is currently shifting gears to mobile pollination services for farmers.

"Our costs have tripled and our production of honey is half what it was," Kliks said.

Downey said her clientele is broadening beyond regular beekeepers. "Now I’m getting a lot of contact with growers saying, ‘I’m not getting production, and I don’t see any bees, and I need to think about keeping bees as part of my lychee orchard.’"

Tracking bees in the islands is difficult because beekeepers aren’t required to register with authorities, unlike in many other states. But a voluntary registration effort is under way that will be important for education and prevention as other pests make their way to the islands.

"Please let us know who you are," Downey said. "How can we reach the people we’re trying to help otherwise?"

Importing bees into Hawaii is illegal and Downey and other bee experts are worried about the possible arrival of the militant Africanized bee, which would quickly overwhelm the relatively laid-back European honeybees in the islands. In a close call last year, trucking company workers were startled when they opened a shipping container on Oahu and bees began flying out. Their quick action prevented a big problem, Oishi said.

"They immediately closed the container and called our plant quarantine office," Oishi said. "The Department of Agriculture worked with the shipping company to properly contain the bees and then kill them. It turned out to be an established hive living inside the container. We got the queen."

Molecular tests showed Africanized genetics within the bees, Oishi said. Krones, who lived through an invasion of Africanized bees as they marched their way through Central America, dreads the prospect of that happening in Hawaii.

"When the Africanized bee arrived in Costa Rica in 1982, I was in full swing producing honey, not queens," Krones said. "It really knocked us out, production wise. It’s a very aggressive bee. And it’s very prone to swarming."

"In Hawaii, it would certainly take over. It’s not only going to affect us as an industry, because we won’t ship any more queens out of here. It’s going to affect also the tourist industry."

Oishi said the state needs to buttress its defenses against such pests. "The bee industry and its impacts are so far-reaching," he said. "We’re talking about affecting food sustainability, not just for Hawaii but for the country. Our bees are that important."