I was shopping at our local produce market in 2007 when I happened to overhear someone talking about a problem he was having with his beehives. For the second year in a row, many of his bees had flown off and never returned. Others outright died. My fellow-shopper lost about half his hives.
This was worrisome, because bees are not individualists – certainly, they are not so individualistic as to decamp from their hives. Yet after doing some research I found that beekeepers all over the country beekeepers had reported this same problem since late 2006. They even began referring to it as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD.
From the Wikipedia page on the phenomenon:
“Sometimes called honeybee depopulation syndrome (HBDS), this is a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony abruptly disappear. While such disappearances have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, the term colony collapse disorder was first applied to a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of Western honeybee colonies in North America in late 2006. Colony collapse is economically significant because many agricultural crops worldwide are pollinated by bees.”
In cases of CCD, the worker bees apparently become disoriented and fly off in multiple directions from the hive. (Bee keepers have referred to this final stage before colony death as Honey Bee Madness.) Their flight has made bee autopsies highly difficult.
In 2006, around the time beekeepers' began coining the term "Colony Collapse Disorder," some of our local beekeepers in Central Florida mentioned they had problems controlling a fungus that was invading their hives. The local theories to explain CCD were all over the map, ranging from genetically modified crops to excessive pesticide use to this mystery fungus. It was also around that time that I found this TED Talk by Dennis vanEngelsdorp
As you can see from the talk, without bee colonies doing their job of pollinating crops, our dietary options would be greatly reduced. While scientists would develop alternate methods of pollination, there would be much less coffee and fewer juices available. The cost of strawberries and other fruit that relies on pollination would skyrocket. Without honeybees doing their job, our dietary lives would be very different.
However, thanks to a recent Odd Couple-style collaboration between entomologists and military scientists from the Department of Homeland Security, a new prime suspect has been discovered for CCD. According to this article in the New York Times, the Army contributed access to software originally designed to identify biological agents in the field when commanders may not be able to normally identify the agent involved. This software works by identifying the proteins in a substance and matches them to a large protein database. According to the Times: “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.”
This type of analysis, called mass spectrometry-based proteomics (MSP), allowed both the Army scientists and the researchers on Dr.Jerry Bromenshenk’s “Bee Alert” Team to identify “two unreported RNA viruses in North American honey bees, Varroa destructor-1 virus and Kakugo virus, and identified an invertebrate iridescent virus (IIV) (Iridoviridae) associated with CCD colonies” according to a peer-reviewed paper in PLoS one.
But the virus strains alone are not enough to cause Colony Collapse Disorder. Scientists have found that, along with the viri, a fungus called Nosema ceranae was also discovered in every hive suffering from CCD. It is not known if the viri weaken the bees first, allowing the fungus to finish them off or if it's the other way around. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” Dr. Bromenshenk said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”
Thanks to the MSP analysis, scientists now have a new lead to follow in this ongoing investigation. This is not a solution, but it IS a giant step forward to finding one. One proposed solution lies in attacking the fungus first, since evidence suggests that is the easier of the two infestations to treat. Entomologists think that if the fungus can be eradicated or at least greatly reduced, that might be enough to get the honeybee population back on track.