The mysterious ailment afflicting bee hives may be caused by a virus, Israeli acute paralysis virus of bees, IAPV ((This is bound to be all over the media, and I’m stuck in an airport without good access, but after our semi-exhaustive coverage of the great bee shortage it wouldn’t do to ignore the news completely.)). That’s the conclusion of a report just published online in Science Express ((D.L. Cox-Foster et al. (2007) A metagenomic survey of microbes in honey bee colony collapse disorder doi:10.1126/science.1146498))
In some respects the technique was dead simple. The researchers took samples from hives that had CCD, hives that didn’t have CCD, and royal jelly. They bulked up all the DNA in the samples and threw it into a very fast sequencer to decode all of it. Computer programs then assembled the various bits and pieces and compared them to all known genes. And the result? Evidence of a whole bunch of bacteria, fungi, animals and viruses, almost all of them equally present in CCD and non-CCD colonies. But one virus — Israeli acute paralysis virus — was found in almost all the CCD samples and only one non-CCD sample.
IAPV is related to Kashmir bee virus and was first described in Israel in 2004. The first recent reports of CCD date to 2004. Of course there are many other factors at work too, including the influence of pesticides and the presence of Varroa mites and the chemicals used to control them, to say nothing of possible changes in climate. As the researchers cautiously note:
We have not proven a causal relationship between any infectious agent and CCD; nonetheless, the prevalence of IAPV sequences in CCD operations, as well as the temporal and geographic overlap of CCD and importation of IAPV-infected bees, indicate that IAPV is a significant marker for CCD.
That’ll do for now. And there’s no mention of mobile phones.