Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery

[groovedaddy]

DENVER — It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees? Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07bees.html?th&emc=th

[OregonBlue]

1. One sentence in the article seemed weird to me. Why sick bees fly away to die.

"Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death. One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility, he said, is a kind of insect insanity."

Or has it occurred to them that perhaps sick bees have an instinct not to remain in the hive and infect other bees? Seems that would be the logical conclusion. Mother nature protecting the colony by "instructing" sick bees to leave.

[Better Today]

2. Unfortunately, it isn't likely "the" answer. In a similar thread yesterday,

it has been pointed out that due to the way we have treated bees and crops, their overall health is so compromised that even if this newly found issue is resolved, another similar one will simply arise. We really need to find better ways of treating them, from the diets which are altered in order to take the honey, the constant trucking around America that is done, and the chemicals they are exposed to on the crops they pollinate.