“They started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.” That’s a Montana beekeeper in last week’s New York Times describing the death of his honeybees.

Bees continue to die from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) while scientists race to discover the cause—and to determine the effects of the drastic loss in the population of these important pollinators.

The last couple weeks have witnessed incredible acceleration in the race to save bees. It started on March 21st, when beekeepers and environmentalists sued the EPA over neonicotinoid, urging the agency to ban the pesticide linked to CCD.

Then, last Wednesday, a study in Nature Communications demonstrated the effects of pesticides on bee brains. The researchers looked at neonicotinoid and another type of pesticide, coumaphos, and found within 20 minutes of exposure, neurons in the major learning center of the brain stopped firing. A parallel study earlier this year in the Journal of Experimental Biology found that bees exposed to the combined pesticides were slower to learn—or completely forgot—important associations between floral scent and food rewards. These findings provide a possible underlying cellular mechanism for the observed disruption and altered foraging behavior seen in bees during CCD.

Finally, two studies published in Science last Friday, describe the loss of diversity of bees and the effect that loss and the decline of all bee species is having on crops that humans depend on. The news is not good. According to a related article in the journal, the studies find “that native wild pollinators are declining… [and] that managed honeybees cannot compensate for this loss.”

For those of us who enjoy the fruits of the bees’ labors—from almonds and apples to onions and watermelons—we should hope that the lawsuit, the research, and the attention will lead to a rapid solution to bee decline.

These parasitic flies will lay eggs in worker bees. We’ll let Ed Yong of Discover take it from there:

Its grubs eventually eat the bees from the inside-out. And the infected workers, for whatever reason, abandon their hives to die.

Even if the bees can avoid the egg laying, A. borealis can still wreak havoc, says ScienceNOW:

In addition, the flies appear to be able to transmit deformed wing virus, which is fatal, and the deadly fungus Nosema ceranae, which causes bee diarrhea.

Yikes!

A. borealis were known to parasitize bumblebees, until San Francisco State entomologists Andrew Core and John Hafernik (also the Academy’s President) found them in honey bees by accident, right outside their building on campus.

After the researchers widened the search, Scientific American reports that:

The team found evidence of the fly in 77 percent of the hives they sampled in the Bay Area of California, as well as in some hives in the state’s agricultural Central Valley and in South Dakota.

Luckily, the flies do little damage to an entire colony, killing off only 5-15% of the worker bees. But researchers speculate that this could be one of the causes of colony collapse disorder, or CCD, which harshly affects honey bee colonies throughout the country. (Watch our story on another possible contributor to CCD here or read about saving the bees here.)

The looming mystery of A. borealis-infected bees appears to be why they abandon their hives, which also occurs in CCD. According to New Scientist:

Hafernik’s team will now investigate whether the nocturnal flights occur because the parasites affect the bees’ “clock” genes, which govern when they are active. It is also possible that contaminated bees are ejected to save the hive.

The research was published online yesterday in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

Image: Christopher Quock/San Francisco State University

Domesticated honey bees have been disappearing for the last several years due to Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. This past fall, researchers found that CCD is potentially caused by a deadly one-two punch from a virus-fungus combination.

In a recent study, published in PLoS One, researchers found that bee pollen pellets can contain the contributing viruses.

The scientists found that even if a bee were not infected with a virus, their pollen pellets could contain viruses, indicating that pollen itself may harbor the deadly agents. When infected pollen is stored in a hive, researchers found the queen could become infected and lay infected eggs, creating an entirely new generation carrying the virus.

Sadly, virus-laden pollen affects more than just honey bees. The researchers found eleven wild species carrying infected pollen pellets, as well. The authors suggest that the pollen is potentially responsible for transmitting the disease from the domestic to wild populations. Perhaps this could be the reason that wild pollinators, such as bumble bees and wasps, have also been in recent decline.

Both natural ecosystems and agriculture depend on pollinators—natives and honey bees. Their health (or lack there of) is essential to all of us. The more we know, the better prepared we are to protect them.

Image by Eli Shany/Wikimedia

Researchers from the University of Montana and the US Army are a step closer to solving the case of colony collapse disorder, or CCD. Publishing in the open access journal PLoS One yesterday, they have determined that the bees are being assaulted by not just one factor, but two.

From the New York Times:

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…

…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.

Now the scientists are racing to determine which attacks the bees first—kind of a chicken and egg scenario between the virus and fungus that are doing the damage.

Sadly, the research is hampered by the fact that the bees fly off and leave the hive to die, scattering the evidence. The scientists are still unsure what causes this action.

The next step for the team is to try and protect the bees. The 80beats blog in Discover describes the work ahead for the University of Montana team:

In the case of Bromenshenk’s team, the scientists’ follow-up task to this week’s study is to isolate the IIV [virus] they found and try to use it in inoculation experiments, hoping that could reveal whether the virus is a key player in causing CCD or just an invader after the fact.

Another article in the New York Times offers why this protection is so important:

Given the source of food they provide, not to mention the honey-based medicines used by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, among others, bees have saved us — or at least soothed us — as a species over the centuries. Returning the favor only seems fair.

Creative Commons image by Cody Hough