For the Record
By Todd Balf and Paul Kvinta (with Michael Kessler, Steven Kotler, and Debra Shore)

The Buzz You've Been Hearing...
...has been about these little guys, varroa mites, shown here magnified 2,000 times while sucking the neck of a honeybee to drain its blood. Along with the European tracheal mite, the varroa for the last year has been engaged in wholesale destruction of the nation's bee colonies. It has killed more than 225 billion workers and queens, costing American apiarists $37.5 million. Thankfully, after months of trial and error, a solution may be on its way: specially developed menthol crystals, which suffocate the parasites with noxious fumes while leaving the bees unharmed.

Guess He's From This Planet After All
In the wake of Miguel Indurain's disastrous 11th-place finish in the Tour de France last July, there was no shortage of theories as to why he bombed. Most blamed the first week's freakishly cold temperatures, noting that Indurain, who had won the race five years in a row, typically fares poorly in frigid climes. Others pointed to the woeful showing of his support riders. Yet few, except perhaps for Big Mig himself, chose the obvious: that surprise winner Bjarne Riis of Denmark was simply the better rider this year. "When I saw the large gear that he was using, my morale was broken," admitted Indurain after Riis made his decisive 16th-stage break on a steep climb in the Pyrenees. Of course, everyone's now asking whether this was merely a bum Tour or the beginning of the end. "I thought he actually looked fat,'' says Jim Ochowicz, directeur sportif of the Motorola Cycling Team. "But you can bet he's going to be extremely motivated to win next year."

Flying Object, Identified
After a huge granite arch plummeted 2,400 feet from Yosemite's Glacier Point on July 10, killing one hiker and injuring 12, much was made of the massive devastation, yet little was known about the offending rock itself. Now investigators have determined that the slab was 495 feet long, 130 feet high, and more than 20 feet thick, meaning that a 60,000-ton object had fallen from the sky at 150 mph. Interestingly, the blast created on impact proved considerably larger than even the most destructive acts of terror in recent memory--further proof that Mother Nature will always have the final word.

The Doctor Is Up
As he neared the pinnacle of Himalayan giant Cho Oyu, 49-year-old Jean Ellis could barely contain himself. "I don't know how big my eyes really were," says Ellis, who reached the top of the 26,906-foot peak at the end of the spring climbing season, becoming the first African-American to summit an 8,000-meter peak. "But I'd guess they were really large." Ellis had been stymied four previous times, including two failed attempts on Everest in '88 and '91. But he refused to give up the dream, at least partially in hopes that his accomplishment will encourage other African-Americans to take up the sport. "Somebody once said mountaineering has no purpose but much meaning," explains Ellis, an emergency-room physician from Billings, Montana. "Certainly for me--and who knows, maybe for some of the kids out there--this had intense meaning."

Helloooo Landfall!
Welcomed by a flotilla of boats, 29-year-old sailor Samantha Brewster arrived in Southhampton, England, on July 8 after 247 days at sea, becoming the first woman and the youngest person to complete a solo east-to-west circumnavigation of the globe. When Brewster set sail last October, route record holder Mike Golding told her that intense boredom would be her primary adversary. Hardly. "I had so many problems I didn't have time to be bored," says Brewster, who was slowed by both seasickness and mechanical setbacks. Though a monthlong layover for repairs in Santos, Brazil, ruined her chance to challenge Golding's 1994 record of 161 days, Brewster has no regrets: "I beat his time on the first leg to the equator, and I never stopped pushing."

Mollie Beattie, 1947-1996
No one was surprised last July when Congress unanimously passed the Mollie Beattie Wilderness Area Act, which named eight million acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after the first female director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who died of brain cancer on June 30. What shocked people was who sponsored the bill: Don Young. The congressman from Alaska, long a proponent of opening ANWR to oil exploration, had often butted heads with Beattie during her three years as director, a tenure in which she restarted the Endangered Species Act's listing program, oversaw the reintroduction of gray wolves into Yellowstone, and added 13 new preserves to the National Wildlife Refuge System. So what's with Young's newfound magnanimity? "Mollie always presented her view as she saw it, without being arrogant or abrasive," he explains. "To me that meant a great deal."

Better Late Than Never
As police scour South America for escaped murderer Darci Alves Pereira, environmentalists the world over have been heard to mutter a common thought: finally. After six years of mounting international pressure, Brazilian authorities are at last pursuing the killers of Chico Mendes, the activist who focused the planet's attention on the destruction of the Amazon rainforest in the 1980s. Last July, police burst into the jungle hideout of Darly Alves da Silva--Pereira's father, who was convicted of ordering Mendes's 1988 murder--and hauled him away to a maximum-security prison. Father and son had both received 19-year sentences in 1990 but quickly escaped from a dilapidated penitentiary, leaving critics to wonder whether the government really wanted them behind bars. "That prison was a joke," says Beto Borges of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network. "You can literally jump over the wall." This time, authorities seem more earnest: Brazilian police had been hunting Alves da Silva for a full year. "It's been a long time coming, but at least they captured him," says Borges. "I'll give them credit for that."