Tuesday Map: Bee theory season
As Carolyn noted back in February, bees are mysteriously vanishing across the United States and, more recently, in Europe. Many news outlets (and even Fidel Castro) have already weighed in on this, but scientists are still baffled about the causes of the Great Bee Die-Off of 2007, a.k.a. “Colony Collapse Disorder,” as the phenomenon has ...
As Carolyn noted back in February, bees are mysteriously vanishing across the United States and, more recently, in Europe. Many news outlets (and even Fidel Castro) have already weighed in on this, but scientists are still baffled about the causes of the Great Bee Die-Off of 2007, a.k.a. "Colony Collapse Disorder," as the phenomenon has come to be known. So far, 27 states have been affected (the following map shows only 25, but it's slightly dated):
As Carolyn noted back in February, bees are mysteriously vanishing across the United States and, more recently, in Europe. Many news outlets (and even Fidel Castro) have already weighed in on this, but scientists are still baffled about the causes of the Great Bee Die-Off of 2007, a.k.a. “Colony Collapse Disorder,” as the phenomenon has come to be known. So far, 27 states have been affected (the following map shows only 25, but it’s slightly dated):
I’ve been tracking the various theories being floated out there to explain CCD, and they are certainly interesting. To stay up to date on CCD, be sure to check in with Penn State University’s Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group, which seems to be at the center of research efforts.
So far, they’ve ruled out:
- Chemical use (i.e., miticide treatments to protect bees)
- Feeding bees (the food source varies from collapsed colony to colony)
- Queen source (the collapsed colonies got their queens from different places)
Instead, they’re concentrating their efforts on the following broad areas:
- Chemical residue/contamination in the wax, food stores and bees
- Known and unknown pathogens in the bees and brood
- Parasite load in the bees and brood
- Nutritional fitness of the adult bees
- Level of stress in adult bees as indicated by stress induced proteins
- Lack of genetic diversity and lineage of bees
They’ve chosen not to investigate—but haven’t ruled out—genetically modified crops and mobile phones as potential causes, noting that “cell phone service is not available in some areas where affected commercial apiaries are located in the west.”
As today’s Times story notes, researchers at Columbia University have their own theory: that some kind of “bee AIDS” is devastating the honeybees’ immune systems. And there’s another possibility: The French government banned a pesticide named imidacloprid for causing “mad bee disease” in the 1990s. One Penn State researcher calls the chemical “the number-one suspect” among the pesticides being studied. Stay tuned.
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