There is a quote going around, attributed to Albert Einstein, along the lines of, "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." The quote is apparently not from Einstein, but the importance of bees in undeniable.
Many are curious and even worried about why bees have been disappearing. Bees play an essential role in both agriculture and in nature. Wild bees have been disappearing, but the commercial suppliers of domesticated European honeybees are the most important pollinator for American crops.
The U.S.D.A. estimates that "one mouthful in three" of food is produced, directly or indirectly, with the help of bee pollination. More recently, domesticated bees have been falling prey to an unknown malady called "colony collapse disorder" or CCD.
In colony collapse, the worker bees fly away and never return. Hives are left empty. It is estimated that 50-90% of commercial beekeepers have been affected in the U.S.
The cause of this syndrome has been a mystery. Suggested causes have included cell phones that interfere with bee navigation, climate change, genetically modified crops, pesticides and unknown pathogens.
Now scientists have a new possibility: a virus found in Israeli bees.
The results of the soon-to-be-published study were announced in the scientific journal "Science." Lead author Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in New York, Diana Cox-Foster, of Pennsylvania State University in University Park and other study scientists sequenced all the microorganisms living inside bees as part of a comparative sequencing project.
Among the bacteria, viruses and fungi in the bees, they made another discovery. The researchers found that genes of the Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) that may have originated in Australia, infect Israeli hives, matched extremely well with hives with the disorder. They found that there was a 96% chance that hives where they found IAPV genes also had CCD.
The researchers cautioned that the correlation does not establish IAPV as the cause, as it could be a secondary infection that followed an unknown pathogen.
Further study is needed to establish causation, but the results offer at least a possible solution to the mystery.
Other researchers expressed caution, as did another study by author Jeffery Pettis of the USDA Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. He noted that most likely CCD has multiple causes and noted in an article in Nature that the controls were much healthier than the hives experiencing CCD.
Israeli scientist Ilan Sela, a virologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently discovered the IAPV virus. However, Israeli hives infected with this virus experienced bees dying inside the hives, rather than the U.S. pattern of worker bees simply failing to return.
IAPV may not be the solution to the disappearing bee mystery, but it has offered the best clue so far to the answer. More work is still needed.
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