Re: Possible Cause of Bee Die-Off Is Found
<TABLE id=apex_layout_271110100662109808 class=formlayout border=0 summary=""><TBODY><TR><TD noWrap align=right>
Archive Number</TD><TD noWrap align=left>20101007.3635</TD></TR><TR><TD noWrap align=right>
Published Date</TD><TD noWrap align=left>07-OCT-2010</TD></TR><TR><TD noWrap align=right>
Subject</TD><TD noWrap align=left>PRO/AH> Colony collapse disorder, apis - USA: possible cause</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER, APIS - USA: POSSIBLE CAUSE****************************************************A ProMED-mail post<
http://www.promedmail.org>ProMED-mail is a program of theInternational Society for Infectious Diseases<
http://www.isid.org>Date: Wed 6 Oct 2010Source: The New York Times [edited]<
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07bees.html?hp>
</PRE>
It has been one of the great murder mysteries of horticulture: 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 2.
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 double-whammy 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 a nuclear
strike on Japan in 1945 largely on the shoulders of scientist-soldiers
in the Manhattan Project. The 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.
But researchers on both sides say that colony collapse may be the 1st
time that the defense machinery of the post-Sep 11 [2001] Homeland
Security 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 in the College of Technology
at the University of Montana and a member of the Bee Alert team.
Human nature and bee nature were interconnected in how the puzzle
pieces came together. 2 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 -- 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's Edgewood Chemical
Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly
written paper that the virus-fungus 1-2 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 combination -- 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 several years ago at the University of 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 _Nosema 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, like bacteria -- 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 1st 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 got refined. A
mortar and pestle worked better then 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 combination attacks in nature, like the virus and fungus
involved in bee deaths, is 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 [2009], when nearly every bee disappeared over the
course of the winter.
[Byline: Kirk Johnson]
--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail
<
promed@promedmail.org>
[This is a fascinating article on partnership and identification of
possible etiological agents. Perhaps the Army lab and the Bee team can
team up with the Bat team and find a cure to white nose syndrome along
with that of colony collapse disorder. While the various teams and
labs may sound comical, identifying the causative agent of colony
collapse disorder and finding a cause is not a laughing matter but one
of serious concern, as is the problem of white nose syndrome. - Mod.TG]
[The full article is available at
<
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013181>.
- Sr.Tech.Ed.MJ]
[see also:
Colony collapse disorder, apis - Europe: EU
20100915.3348
2009
----
Colony collapse disorder, apis - USA: cause
20090826.3008
Colony collapse disorder, apis - USA: multiple causes susp
20090731.2687
2008
----
Undiagnosed die-off, apis - China: (GD), RFI
20081119.3654
Undiagnosed die-off, apis - UK: pesticides susp.
20081004.3133
Honeybee die-off - UK
20080818.2574
Colony collapse disorder, apis - Germany: chemical ban
20080613.1868
2007
----
Colony collapse disorder, apis - USA: (FL)
20071026.3490
Undiagnosed die-off, apis - USA (Multistate) (03): agent identified
20070907.2960
Undiagnosed die-off, apis - USA : (Multistate) (02)
20070503.1436
Undiagnosed die-off, apis - USA : (Multistate) (02)
20070503.1435
Undiagnosed die-off, apis - USA (Multistate)
20070208.0497]
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