DAVIS, CA — After more than twenty years and several hundred million dollars in research, a team of entomologists announced Monday that bees may be dying because humans keep taking their food.

"We looked at pesticides. We looked at mites. We looked at cell towers, climate change and a fungus with a very long name," said lead researcher Dr. Paul Hendricks. "At no point did anyone consider the wooden boxes we open every summer to remove the food."

The breakthrough came, researchers said, when a graduate student noticed that each hive works all year to store honey for winter, and that each fall a man in a veil arrives and takes it.

Beekeepers pushed back on the findings, noting that they replace the honey with sugar water. "It's basically the same thing," said one, who then declined to say how he would feel if someone replaced his groceries with a two-liter of Sprite.

Bee representatives, who are pursuing a separate claim for 30,000 years of stolen honey, said they were glad science had finally caught up. "We have been saying this since the Stone Age," said a spokesbee. "Literally. There are cave paintings."

At press time, the research team had applied for a new grant to study why bees seem so upset.