James William of Discovery News goes straight to the USDA Bee Research Lab to find out what’s been going on with honeybees in North America.

Where this video goes beyond many of the other news stories that we’ve seen — as one might expect from the Discovery Channel — here, the emphasis is on the actual steps that the scientists and researchers are going through to try to track down the causes of Colony Collapse Disorder.

(Watch for the footage of bees being dissected to check for tracheal mites — something the average beekeeper doesn’t usually get to see when we send samples off for testing.)

Williams reports that the researchers he spoke to are optimistic about their work, thanks to the encoding of the honeybee genome that was accomplished last year, and the greater range of genetic study that this makes possible.

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