If there’s one positive side to the recent struggles faced by beekeepers in North America, it may be in the amount of press that the apiculture industry has gained. The honeybee has finally gone mainstream, one might say, capturing the sympathy and imagination of the public (and even political cartoonists) in a way that “bugs” seldom manage to do. People who never thought twice about the critical role of honeybee pollination in ensuring our food supply are now keenly aware of the value of bees, and of their plight.
Since last fall, large numbers of U.S. bees have mysteriously disappeared from hives in at least 35 of the 50 states — a mystery that’s caught the attention of Ian Lipkin.
And who is Ian Lipkin?
You won’t find his name in the rolls of prominent bee researchers or apiculturists. In fact, Science News reports, before now Lipkin has never studied a bee disease — he works in the epidemiology department of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Lipkin is the pathogen hunter who in 1999 figured out that a cluster of people with encephalitis in New York had caught a then-obscure virus called West Nile. Since then, his lab has refined ways to use high-speed genetic sequencing to search for novel pathogens worldwide. What involved him in this insect-disease case, he says, is “the same thing that has captured the imagination of the public — the notion that there’s been this inexplicable loss of bees.”
The theories around Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) have been many and varied, to say the least.
(Jeff Pettis, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture bee research laboratories, joked to a reporter from the Washington Post that the vanished bees might have “worn themselves out making crop circles, thus explaining two mysteries at once”!)
So far, researchers have ruled out several hypotheses including cell phone usage and it’s beginning to look as if “more than one factor may be coming together” in the mystery of the missing honeybees, Pettis says.
Research is hampered by the lack of sample to work on, because CCD doesn’t leave large numbers of dead bees in the hive to be analyzed by scientists. Working with what is available, however, Lipkin and his colleagues in epedimiology have been working with the bee labs to analyze the genetic material, looking for genetic sequences that show up in sick colonies but not in healthy ones.
Identifying the source of those sequences could reveal a pathogen.
Starting in March, Lipkin and his epidemiology team have thrown themselves into the search, working with bee labs. “This has been a huge project, absolutely huge,” Lipkin says.
After all this work, Lipkin’s tight-lipped about what his analyses have revealed. He will say, however, that his lab, with help from others, is closing in on a suspicious infectious agent.
See:
Not-So-Elementary Bee Mystery: Detectives sift clues in the case of the missing insects
by Susan Milius
Science News, Vol. 172, No. 4, p. 56
Written by beekeepers
Topics: World of Apiculture