On a hot summer day, not much can top a cold scoop of ice cream.

"It cools you down, it tastes good," Rick Brubaker said. "There are lot of flavors here too."

But believe it or not, those 31 varieties and beyond, could be in question, thanks to a shortage of bees.

"It's nice we have these different flavors, I never thought it would correlate with bees," Marcia Brubaker said.

It turns out, bees make more than honey. In fact, one-third of the U.S. food supply depends on the pollination from bees. But, in the past few years, colonies in this country have been mysteriously disappearing.

"If the bees don't do their job of pollinating, then the crop yield goes down," John Partridge of the MSU Food Science Program said.

Those crops eventually become ingredients to the ice cream at the MSU Dairy store like beet sugar and almonds.

"We also use things like strawberries and cherries and apples in our ice cream for flavoring," Partridge said.

For Haagen Dazs, 40 percent of its 60 flavors comes from bees.

"Any manufacturer of ice cream is going to feel the pinch," Partridge said.

Scientists haven't figured out just exactly why the bees are disappearing, but Haagen Dazs has a vested interest, so they created this special flavor - Vanilla Honey Bee - and proceeds will go to research.

"If we don't get a handle on this situation," Partridge said, "it could become more severe."

Which could mean ice cream prices may go up, produce too.

"Who would have thunk a little thing like a bee could make a big difference," he said.

But many say, on days like this, they'd happily dig deeper into their pockets if they had to.

"It's worth it," Albert Hafner said.

Scientists first noticed "colony collapse disorder" in 2004. They suspect a virus may combine with other factors to cause this problem.
$15-billion dollars in US crops each year are dependent on bees for pollination.