[Pollinator] NYT: Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery

[Jennifer Tsang]

Thanks to Doug Holy for forwarding the below:

 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07bees.html?_r=1
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07bees.html?_r=1&emc=eta1>
&emc=eta1 .

 

October 6, 2010

Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery

By KIRK JOHNSON
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/kirk_johnson/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> 

DENVER - It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what
is killing off the honeybees
<http://www.nytimes.com/info/bees/?inline=nyt-classifier> ? 

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 <http://www.plosone.org/home.action>
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. 

Liaisons between the military and academia are nothing new, of course. World
War II, perhaps the most profound example, ended in an atomic strike on
Japan in 1945 largely on the shoulders of scientist-soldiers in the
Manhattan Project. And a group of scientists led by Jerry Bromenshenk of the
University of Montana in Missoula has researched bee-related applications
for the military in the past - developing, for example, a way to use
honeybees in detecting land mines
<http://maic.jmu.edu/journal/7.3/focus/bromenshenk/bromenshenk.htm> . 

But researchers on both sides say that colony collapse may be the first time
that the defense machinery of the post-Sept. 11 Homeland Security
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/homelan
d_security_department/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  Department and academia
have teamed up to address a problem that both sides say they might never
have solved on their own. 

"Together we could look at things nobody else was looking at," said Colin
Henderson, an associate professor at the University of Montana's College of
Technology and a member of Dr. Bromenshenk's "Bee Alert" team. 

Human nature and bee nature were interconnected in how the puzzle pieces
came together. Two brothers helped foster communication across disciplines.
A chance meeting and a saved business card proved pivotal. Even learning how
to mash dead bees for analysis - a skill not taught at West Point
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_
states_military_academy/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  - became a factor. 

One perverse twist of colony collapse that has compounded the difficulty of
solving it is that the bees do not just die - they fly off in every
direction from the hive, then die alone and dispersed. That makes large
numbers of bee autopsies - and yes, entomologists actually do those -
problematic. 

Dr. Bromenshenk's team at the University of Montana and Montana State
University in Bozeman, working with the Army <http://www.ecbc.army.mil> 's
Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their
jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every
killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to
devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal. 

"It's chicken and egg in a sense - we don't know which came first," Dr.
Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo - nor is it clear, he added,
whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second,
or whether they somehow compound the other's destructive power. "They're
co-factors, that's all we can say at the moment," he said. "They're both
present in all these collapsed colonies." 

Research at the University of
<http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univ
ersity_of_california/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  California, San Francisco,
had already identified the fungus as part of the problem. And several
RNA-based viruses had been detected as well. But the Army/Montana team,
using a new software system developed by the military for analyzing
proteins, uncovered a new DNA-based virus, and established a linkage to the
fungus, called N. ceranae. 

"Our mission is to have detection capability to protect the people in the
field from anything biological," said Charles H. Wick, a microbiologist at
Edgewood. Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see
what the Army's analytic software tool could do. "We brought it to bear on
this bee question, which is how we field-tested it," he said. 

The Army software system - an advance itself in the growing field of protein
research, or proteomics - is designed to test and identify biological agents
in circumstances where commanders might have no idea what sort of threat
they face. The system searches out the unique proteins in a sample, then
identifies a virus or other microscopic life form based on the proteins it
is known to contain. The power of that idea in military or bee defense is
immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use what they already
know to find something they did not even know they were looking for. 

But it took a family connection - through David Wick, Charles's brother - to
really connect the dots. When colony collapse became news a few years ago,
Mr. Wick, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Montana in the 1990s for the
outdoor lifestyle, saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about
bees. 

Mr. Wick knew of his brother's work in Maryland, and remembered meeting Dr.
Bromenshenk at a business conference. A retained business card and a
telephone call put the Army and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same
blossom. 

The first steps were awkward, partly because the Army lab was not used to
testing bees, or more specifically, to extracting bee proteins. "I'm
guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees
and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very
complicated." 

The process eventually was refined. A mortar and pestle worked better than
the desktop, and a coffee grinder worked best of all for making good bee
paste. 

Scientists in the project emphasize that their conclusions are not the final
word. The pattern, they say, seems clear, but more research is needed to
determine, for example, how further outbreaks might be prevented, and how
much environmental factors like heat, cold or drought might play a role. 

They said that combination attacks in nature, like the virus and fungus
involved in bee deaths, are quite common, and that one answer in protecting
bee colonies might be to focus on the fungus - controllable with antifungal
agents - especially when the virus is detected. 

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. 

In any event, the university's bee operation itself proved vulnerable just
last year, when nearly every bee disappeared over the course of the winter. 

 

 

 

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