Her elementary school teacher in Manheim Township ordered her to quit hauling bugs to class for show and tell.

In college, her parents tried to guide her into a career as a teacher.

Even after she rebelled and earned her degree in entomology, Susan Cobey couldn't figure out at first how to make a living without exterminating the insects she loves.

When she began preaching the value of artificial insemination of honey bees — yes, you can do that with bees, too — as a way to get more productive and healthier bees, bee keepers broke up.

"I'd set up my tables at bee meetings and people used to just laugh at me," she recalls.

No one's snickering now.

With one-quarter of the nation's commercial bee hives decimated last winter by the mysterious bee colony collapse disorder, the shy Cobey has emerged as one of the great hopes for avoiding a devastating pollination crisis that could affect much of our food.

Cobey, 53, who spent the first 11 years of her life in the Grandview Heights neighborhood of Lancaster, is manager of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at the University of California Davis in northern California.

"Most of my life has been inside a beehive," Cobey says during a phone interview last week.

But now the shy woman finds herslef on a media watch list.

She is perhaps the world's leading authority on bee insemination and a renowned bee researcher and geneticist.

So what you say?

Consider that nearly one-third of our food depends on pollination from commercial beehives that are transported by trucks from field to field for that purpose. Without bee pollination, there would be much fewer fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries around.

We're talking honeybees here, although bumblebees, leaf cutter bees and a few others do a small percentage of the pollinating.

No one has pinpointed the exact cause of the colony collapse disorder that is sweeping beehives from coast to coast.

Cobey thinks it's bees succumbing to a variety of stresses, including mites, because we've raised "welfare bees," where hives are injected with production-boosting food, antibiotics and insecticide chemicals and other aids.

At the same time, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides pumped into their environment have destroyed the natural habitat and food sources of bees.

"It's just an overload. The bees' immune system has been compromised," Cobey frets.

This is where her long tinkering with artificial insemination comes into play. It's actually called instrumental insemination as Cobey has invented a tiny ruby-tipped hook that inserts the vacuumed sperm from drone bees into queen bees, which spend their entire life laying eggs.

In this way, Cobey can sift among hives to find bees with certain traits, then combine them. Since the early 1980s she has worked tirelessly in breeding a strain of honey bees that will be productive in making honey and, most importantly, have traits that make them very anal about good hygiene and willing to attack any invading mites.

"It's a bit frustrating and overwhelming," she says. But while she doesn't think there will ever be a "super bee," infusing more productive and disease-resistant honey bees into commercial beehives is certainly attainable.

"We need to get serious about selective breeding," says Cobey, who travels worldwide with her message and who owns her own honeybee insemination service.

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Cobey grew up in Lancaster in a family that reveled in nature. Her late father, Harry Cobey Jr., wrote a gardening column for the Sunday News from 1996 to 2002. Her mother, Jane Cobey, who lives in the Blossom Hill development, is still an active birdwatcher.

Cobey remembers growing up in suburban Lancaster as "an idyllic childhood." She had a butterfly collection from her backyard by first grade and loved plucking bugs from bushes and a nearby stream.

She admits, though, that taking a nest of tent caterpillars to class wasn't a great idea, in hindsight.

This recollection of her long-ago fantasy world prompts musings on just how rare such carefree childhoods are anymore.

"I don't think we have that much of them anymore," she says. "Kids spend most of their time on computers. I think that's why we don't have much appreciation of the environment. We've certainly made a mess of it.

"Take the video games away and send your kids outside. Teach these kids this is really a fragile place we live in and we can't keep abusing it."

Cobey, who does most of her research and teaching in jeans and a t-shirt, says she's still shy — "I would still prefer to be out there with the bees than in a crowd of people, that's for sure."

Not so shy, though, that at her wedding to Timothy Lawrence, an analyst with UC Davis Extension, the couple both donned beards of live bees.

Sweet.