On May 12, 2007, Dr. Peter Teal spoke on Quirks & Quarks (CBC Radio’s science program) about the decline of honeybees over the past few years.

Dr. Peter Teal is the Research Leader of the Chemistry Research Unit at the Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology of the US Department of Agriculture in Gainesville, Florida. He’s been studying one possible contributor to the bees’ tribulations: a new bee pest that has invaded North America and quickly spread among commercially raised bees. The pest is a tiny beetle that literally smells the bees’ fear, and uses that smell to locate and invade beehives.

Get the “Bees and Beetles” radio segment as an mp3 audio file at http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/pastpodcasts.html?17#ref17, and listen to it with any of these free media players: Windows Media Player, iTunes, or RealPlayer.

Could there be a link between Small Hive Beetle and Colony Collapse Disorder?

CCD is not in Canada, and we also don’t have the SHB problem that the USA experiences — it’s an interesting coincidence, at the very least…