In general money spent on research can best be viewed largely as building fundamental knowledge bases and the cost of education of future generations.  Relatively little basic research yields profitable new inventions near term.  Yet, if that money was not spent in the past there are all kinds of things that would not exist today that we take for granted and view as indispensable.  Just to give one example consider the smart phones we have today.  We have these devices because of a whole cascade of past academic research efforts that lead to things as diverse as lasers, transistors and how to chemically separate rare earths from each other.  All of these were things that were done in academia 60 or 90 years ago.  Yeah, transistors actually came out of Bell Labs, but without the academic stuff done before their invention they could not have been invented when they were invented.
In the case of honey bees likely the most important near term benefit might come from Ramsey's work showing mites live on fat bodies.  At some point this understanding might help us better control either mites or the viral diseases they transmit. Or maybe it will not help at all.  There is no way to find out other than wait and see.

The fact of life is much research money spent looks like a total waste at the time it is spent.  But, it builds a knowledge base and a trains a whole bunch of people on how to do science.  You simply have no clue at the time you are spending the money what can be built 20 or 30 or 50 years down the road from that knowledge base, nor what those now trained researchers may do 20 or so years down the road that leads to some invention that changes lots of people's lives.
Dick

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