[Pollinator] Science News: Honeybee CSI: Why dead bodies can't be found

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Honeybee CSI: Why dead bodies can't be found
 
 
 
_Home_ (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/home)  / _News_ 
(http://www.sciencenews.org/view/latest)  / _December  20th, 2008; Vol.174 #13_ 
(http://www.sciencenews.org/view/issue/id/39093/title/December_20th,_2008;_Vol.174_#13)  / News 
item 
Honeybee CSI: Why dead bodies can’t  be found 
 
Virus could explain one symptom of colony  collapse
By _Susan  Milius_ 
(http://www.sciencenews.org/view/authored/id/70/name/Susan_Milius)  
_December  20th, 2008; Vol.174 #13_ 
(http://www.sciencenews.org/view/issue/id/39093/title/December_20th,_2008;_Vol.174_#13)  (p. 5) 
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(http://www.sciencenews.org/view/access/id/39118/title/sm_storyone_mainimage.jpg) 
HEALTHY VS COLLAPSED_ENLARGE_ 
(http://www.sciencenews.org/pictures/122008/sm_storyone_mainimage_zoom.jpg)  | Healthy hives (top) have  worker bees covering 
most combs, but in hives with colony collapse disorder  (bottom), a lot of 
bees leave the hive and don’t return.Custom Life Science Images

There’s bad news for diehards still arguing that honeybees are getting  
abducted by aliens. 
Beehives across North America continue to lose their workers for reasons not  
yet understood, a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder. But new tests  
suggest how a virus nicknamed IAPV might be to blame for one of the more  
puzzling aspects of the disorder—the impression that substantial numbers of bees  
vanish into thin air. 
In tests on hives in a greenhouse, bees infected with IAPV (short for Israeli 
 acute paralytic virus) rarely died in the hive. Sick bees expired throughout 
the  greenhouse, including near the greenhouse wall, Diana Cox-Foster of 
Pennsylvania  State University in University Park reported November 18 in Reno, 
Nev., at the  annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America. 
Outdoors, the bees could scatter across the landscape where the occasional  
dead insect wouldn’t be easily noticed before scavengers found it. 
Illusory alien abduction is just one of many symptoms that need explaining,  
though. The prevailing hypothesis is that multiple forces combine to cause  
colony collapse disorder, such as pesticide exposure, parasites and possibly  
IAPV, Cox-Foster reported. 
Viruses belonging to the group including IAPV linger in pollen. Cox-Foster  
said that she and her colleagues have for the first time isolated bee viruses  
from pollen samples from outdoor hives, though IAPV itself was not found. In  
another study, the same viral strains showed up in wild bees and neighboring  
domestic hives. “Our conclusion is the strains are circulating freely,”  
Cox-Foster said. 
So though the viruses don’t affect mammals and bee products would not be a  
threat to people, infected bees might contaminate visited flowers, perhaps  
spreading the alien-abduction symptoms. 
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BEE-SEARCH_ENLARGE_ 
(http://www.sciencenews.org/pictures/122008/sm_storyone_evans_zoom.jpg)  | Jay Evans of the USDA’s Bee  Research Lab in Beltsville, 
Md., studies the effects of pathogens on  honeybees.USDA-ARS

Bee scientists first noticed weird bee losses in November 2006 when  
Pennsylvania beekeeper Dave Hackenberg reported substantial numbers of hives  failing 
for unknown reasons. Honeybees have plenty of reasons to die during  winter, 
but an experienced beekeeper could diagnose the usual ones, so  researchers 
paid attention to Hackenberg. 
By mid-December 2006 a team of bee specialists had described the new  
phenomenon, calling it colony collapse disorder. Colonies otherwise just humming  
along would lose most of their worker bees in a matter of weeks. The honey, the  
queen and the very young brood would be largely abandoned without enough of a  
workforce to tend to them. During that winter, a quarter of beekeepers across 
 the country reported similar disappearances, and 37 percent of U.S. 
beekeeping  operations reported collapses during the following winter. 
Roughly a third of food production worldwide depends on animal pollinators  
such as bees. North American farmers start renting honeybees in February to  
ensure pollination of the almond crop, and continue renting bees for other crops 
 throughout the growing season. Rental prices for bees are rising, in part  
because of the collapses. Price changes affect the economics of crops from New  
England blueberries to Washington state apples. 
Even small, stationary operations have been struck by the disorder, said  
Cox-Foster. “We’ve had some organic growers report collapses.” 
Analyses of beekeeping practices dashed notions that some food or treatment  
to keep pests out of the hives was to blame, she reported. Several studies 
have  failed to find links between colony collapse and acute exposure to crops  
genetically modified to produce the Bt pesticide. 
IAPV surfaced as a suspect in September 2007. Researchers at Columbia  
University and a consortium of other centers and the USDA reported that  sequencing 
DNA from collapsed and healthy hives revealed a high percentage of  the 
once-obscure virus among the sick hives. At the time, researchers cautioned  that 
the virus might be playing a major role or might just be an opportunist,  useful 
as a marker. 
In a perfect world, Cox-Foster would have performed the classic experiments  
based on Koch’s postulates: giving a suspected pathogen to an organism, seeing 
 if the disease symptoms match and then trying to recover the same pathogen 
from  the newly ill. Infecting free-flying bees with a potential cause of the 
disorder  wasn’t an option, though, so the team experimented in greenhouses. 
Those greenhouses stress the bees, says Dennis vanEngelsdorp, Pennsylvania’s  
acting state apiarist. The stress weakens the bees and may contribute to 
their  collapse, he says, agreeing that the virus certainly isn’t the whole 
answer. He  points out that IAPV has turned up in colonies that don’t collapse, as 
if  they’re usually healthy enough to cope with it. 
Exposure to conventional pesticides might also affect bee health. Residues of 
 75 pesticides have turned up in pollen samples, according to ongoing work by 
 Maryann Frazier of Penn State and her colleagues. The pesticide list 
includes  chemicals that are no longer in wide use, such as DDT. 
Cox-Foster said in Reno that she was surprised by the range of pesticides  
found. One sample included residues of the pesticide aldicarb exceeding levels  
considered toxic for humans, if humans were eating pollen. (Tests of honey 
show  it’s safe, Cox-Foster said.) Effects of such cocktails on bees, however, 
still  need clarification. 
Despite the new evidence, the pieces of the puzzle aren’t falling into a tidy 
 pattern. “I’m not happy about the answer I’m giving you,” says 
vanEngelsdorp. A  mix of miseries seems to drive a colony to collapse, but it’s not 
always the  same mix. 
“It’s like heart disease in humans,” he says. “Two people can have a heart  
attack and not share any underlying causes.” 
 
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Laurie Davies Adams
Executive  Director
Pollinator Partnership 
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LDA at pollinator.org

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