Thread: Bees Wiped Out by Cascade of Deadly Events

Robert Roy Britt -- LiveScience Senior Writer
www.LiveScience.com
Tue May 17, 2005



Bees across the United States have succumbed in recent years to a treacherous alien mite that invaded the country two decades ago. But scientists haven't been able to figure out why the parasite is so destructive.

Up to 60 percent of hives in some regions have been wiped out. Entire colonies can collapse within two weeks of being infested. North Carolina fears it is on the verge of an agricultural crisis. No state is immune.


A new study suggests the killing mechanism is complex. The mites not only eat bees from the inside out, but they suppress the bee's immune systems. That opens the door for a virus that deforms bee wings to take over. The entire hive, even its food source, gets infected.


Agricultural headache

Agriculture in the United States depends on the European honeybee. As much as a third of the American diet depends on their ability to pollinate crops that total in the billions of dollars every year.


The bees' nemesis, the eight-legged Varroa destructor mite, is the size of a pin head. It gets inside the bees' airways, begins feasting and blocks breathing. It also eats bee larvae.

The mites are resistant to pesticides. Breeding programs designed to develop bees that can resist the mite have so far been unsuccessful.

Researchers suspect the mite arrived on Chinese honeybees around 1987. The Chinese bees know how to deal with the parasite. "The native Chinese bees do not have the same problems," said Xiaolong Yang, a post-doctoral researcher in entomology and plant pathology at Penn State who raised bees in China. "I do not recall seeing deformed wing bees in the Chinese bee. Chinese honeybees have grooming behavior which can remove the mites from the bees. They get rid of the mites."


While researchers know that the Varroa mite is behind the death of bee colonies, the mechanism causing the deaths is still unknown. Yang and Dr. Diana L. Cox-Foster, Penn State professor of entomology, now believe that a combination of bee mites, deformed wing virus and bacteria is causing the problems occurring in hives across the country. "Once one mite begins to feed on a developing bee, all the subsequent mites will use the same feeding location," Cox-Foster said today. "Yang has seen as many as 11 adult mites feeding off of one bee. Other researchers have shown that both harmful and harmless bacteria may infect the feeding location."


Downward spiral

European honeybees in the United States have long dealt with a virus that deforms their wings. Alone, the virus does not threaten colonies, however. The bee mite infestation seems to raise the number of deformed wing virus cases to about 25 percent of a population.


Yang and Cox-Foster injected bacteria into bees. In mite-infested bees, the deformed wing virus blossomed rapidly. In mite-free bees, it didn't change.


A final, fatal step is involved. Worker bees put a sterilizing agent into honey and the colony's food. Mite-infested bees can't produce as much of the agent. Cox-Foster suspects the honey then carries more bacteria. "It is likely that the combination of increased mite infestation, virus infection and bacteria is the cause of the two-week death collapse of hives," she said.


The results are detailed today in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.


Meanwhile, some researchers have advocated fostering dwindling populations of wild honeybees. Some 4,000 species are native to North America. While most seem to resist the mite, they're numbers have shrunk due to pesticide use and changes to the land. Wild bees often nest in the ground and can't survive in an agricultural setting.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/beeswi...ofdeadlyevents


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There are places around here, through the Extension Services, where they will help you set up bee hives. North Carolina was also badly hit. The services also teach you how to become a bee keeper and how to take care of the hives. Honey bees are essential to crops. If I didn't have such a fear of them I would put hives in my backyard.

Bees - and our diet - on the brink
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
31 minutes ago

BELTSVILLE, Md. - Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have.

Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program. "This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said.

While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and alarming. U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their colonies — or about five times the normal winter losses — because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.

Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and early results of a key study this week point to some kind of disease or parasite.

Even before this disorder struck, America's honeybees were in trouble. Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because their gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands of their close cousins. "Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees can weather this perfect storm," Hackett said. "Do they have the resilience to bounce back? We'll know probably by the end of the summer."

Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective work at USDA's bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent weeks, Hackett briefed Vice President Cheney's office on the problem. Congress has held hearings on the matter. "This crisis threatens to wipe out production of crops dependent on bees for pollination," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement.

A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to our food supply.

Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, "honeybees are, for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American crops," a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and recruit other honeybees to visit, too.

Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature's "workhorse — and we took it for granted."

"We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth," told The Associated Press on Monday.

Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no workers, just newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees would be found near the hive, this time they just disappeared. The die-off takes just one to three weeks.

USDA's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, who is coordinating the detective work on this die-off, has more suspected causes than time, people and money to look into them.

The top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, pesticides, or a one-two combination of the top four, with one weakening the honeybee and the second killing it.

A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation.

The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.

However, Pettis and others said while the parasite nosema ceranae may be a factor, it cannot be the sole cause. The fungus has been seen before, sometimes in colonies that were healthy.

Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if mankind is too dependent on honeybees. The scientific warning signs came in two reports last October.

First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005.

Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.

What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins," Berenbaum said.

University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed.

Yet Bromenshenk said, "I'm not ready to panic yet." He said he doesn't think a food crisis is looming.

Even though experts this year gave what's happening a new name and think this is a new type of die-off, it may have happened before.

Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s and 1970s that sound somewhat the same. There were reports of something like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And Germany had something similar in 2004, said Peter Neumann, co-chairman of a 17-country European research group studying the problem.

"The problem is that everyone wants a simple answer," Pettis said. "And it may not be a simple answer."


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070502/...Tta1oeTBVH2ocA

___


On the Net:

Colony Collapse Disorder Web page by the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium:

http://maarec.cas.psu.edu/ColonyCollapseDisorder.html

National Academy of Sciences study on pollinators: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id11761

Scientists examine cause of bee die-off
By GENARO C. ARMAS, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jun 15, 4:11 PM ET

LEWISBURG, Pa. - Scientists investigating a mysterious ailment that has killed many of the nation's honeybees are concentrating on pesticides and microorganisms as possible causes of the disorder, and some beekeepers are refusing to place their hives near chemically treated fields.

Scientists from Penn State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are leading the research into the disease, which has killed tens of thousands of bee colonies in at least 35 states.

The die-off has threatened the livelihood of commercial beekeepers and strained fruit growers and other farmers who rely on bees to pollinate more than 90 flowering crops, including apples, nuts and citrus trees.

After months of study, researchers cannot tie the ailment to any single factor. But scientists are focused on a new, unnamed pathogen found in dead bees, and on the role of pesticides, said Maryann Frazier, a senior extension associate in the university's entomology department.

David Hackenberg was the first beekeeper to report the disorder to Penn State last fall after losing nearly 75 percent of his 3,200 colonies. He has rebuilt his business to 2,400 colonies but now asks growers whether they use the chemicals because he is convinced the bees are being harmed by pesticides, especially a type called neonicotinoids.

"I'm quizzing every farmer around," Hackenberg said. "If you're going to use that stuff, then you're going to have go to somebody else."

If bees continue to die, he said, Hackenberg Apiaries may have to raise prices to replace dead hives. The business charges about $90 a hive to "lease" bees in fields. Replacing a hive with new bees costs $120.

Neonicotinoids do not contain nicotine — the addictive drug found in tobacco — but they are named after it because they target nerve cells in a similar way.

Bayer Crop Science is one of the nation's top producers of neonicotinoid pesticides, which have been on the market since 1994. But company spokesman John Boyne said neonicotinoids are not the cause of the honeybees' demise. "We have done a significant amount of research on our products, and we are comfortable this it is not the cause," Boyne said. He said "a number of nonchemical causes may be to blame."

Beekeeper Jim Aucker, of Millville, was left with just 240 of his 1,200 hives earlier this spring after the illness struck. He's back up to nearly 600 hives now and is convinced pesticides are playing a role after finding chemicals that had been sprayed on crops in the dead hives. "Whether it's 100 percent the cause, I'm not sure, but I'm positive it's not helping," Aucker said. He doesn't plan to return to fields where he thinks there might be a pesticide problem.

Daniel Weaver, president of the American Beekeeping Federation, said he is not surprised some beekeepers are avoiding fields with pesticides. "I try to limit my association to growers that I know will be responsible" he said, referring to farmers who avoid applying pesticide while the bees are flying. "Of course, I can't escape it completely."

But he also cautioned that the bees' immune systems may have been weakened for reasons unrelated to pathogens or pesticides, such as mites.

Reports from other beekeepers varied in mid-June — a time when bee colonies are supposed to be thriving. Some beekeepers said they are losing bees, while others are holding steady or growing colonies again.

Hackenberg said he even tried to disinfect many of his hives by sending them through a giant radiation machine in Mulberry, Fla., run by a private firm that typically treats pharmaceuticals and food products.

But he fears what might happen if his bees fall ill again. As he worked with a thriving hive on a hill above his house, his cell phone rang with a caller asking about lining up bees for 2008.

"Yeah, we sell bees," he said, "if we're still in business next year."

___

On the Net:

Mid-Atlantic Apiculture: http://maarec.cas.psu.edu/

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070615/...DAtGxUiles0NUE

See also :

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070615/..._us/dying_bees

Virus may be cause of honeybees' deaths
By ANDREW BRIDGES, Associated Press Writer
15 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Scientific sleuths have a new suspect for a mysterious affliction that has killed off honeybees by the billions: a virus previously unknown in the United States.

The scientists report using a novel genetic technique and old-fashioned statistics to identify Israeli acute paralysis virus as the latest potential culprit in the widespread deaths of worker bees, a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

Next up are attempts to infect honeybees with the virus to see if it indeed is a killer. "At least we have a lead now we can begin to follow. We can use it as a marker and we can use it to investigate whether it does in fact cause disease," said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist and co-author of the study. Details appear this week in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

Experts stressed that parasitic mites, pesticides and poor nutrition all remain suspects, as does the stress of travel. Beekeepers shuffle bees around the nation throughout the year so the bees can pollinate crops as they come into bloom, contributing about $15 billion a year to U.S. agriculture.

The newfound virus may prove to have added nothing more than insult to the injuries bees already suffer, said several experts unconnected to the study.

"This may be a piece or a couple of pieces of the puzzle, but I certainly don't think it is the whole thing," said Jerry Hayes, chief of the apiary section of Florida's Agriculture Department.

Still, surveys of honey bees from decimated colonies turned up traces of the virus nearly every time. Bees untouched by the phenomenon were virtually free of it. That means finding the virus should be a red flag that a hive is at risk and merits a quarantine, scientists said.

"The authors themselves recognize it's not a slam dunk, it's correlative. But it's certainly more than a smoking gun — more like a smoking arsenal. It's very compelling," said May Berenbaum, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entomologist who headed a recent examination of the decline in honeybee and other pollinator populations across North America.

For Berenbaum and others, colony collapse disorder is only the latest devastating problem to beset bees.

"Even if we were to solve this CCD thing tomorrow — a magic pill came out and your bees were cured forever — we would still be in a crisis situation because we have these other problems," said Nicholas Calderone, an entomologist at Cornell University. His lab's roughly 200 hives have so far escaped the disorder.

Colony collapse disorder has struck between 50 percent and 90 percent of commercial honeybee hives in the U.S. That has raised fears about the effect on the more than 90 crops that rely on bees to pollinate them.

Scientists previously have found that blasting emptied hives with radiation apparently kills whatever infectious agent that causes the disorder. That has focused their attention on viruses, bacteria and the like, to the exclusion of other noninfectious phenomena, such as cell phone interference, that also are proposed as culprits.

The earliest reports of colony collapse disorder date to 2004, the same year the virus was first described by Israeli virologist Ilan Sela. That also was the year U.S. beekeepers began importing bees from Australia — a practice that had been banned by the Honeybee Act of 1922.

Now, Australia is being eyed as a potential source of the virus. That could turn out to be an ironic twist because the Australian imports were meant to bolster U.S. bee populations devastated by another scourge, the varroa mite.

Officials are discussing reinstating the ban, said the Agriculture Department's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis.

In the new study, a team of nearly two dozen scientists used the genetic sequencing equivalent of a dragnet to round up suspects. The technique, called pyrosequencing, generates a list of the full repertoire of genes in bees they examined from U.S. hives and directly imported from Australia.

By separating out the bee genes and then comparing the leftover genetic sequences with others detailed in public databases, the scientists could pick out every fungus, bacterium, parasite and virus harbored by the bees.

The scientists then looked for each pathogen in bees collected from normal hives and others affected by colony collapse disorder. That statistical comparison showed Israeli acute paralysis virus was strongly associated with the disorder.

Sela, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said he will collaborate with U.S. scientists on studying how and why the bee virus may be fatal. Preliminary research shows some bees can integrate genetic information from the virus into their own genomes, apparently giving them resistance, Sela said in a telephone interview. Sela added that about 30 percent of the bees he has examined had done so.

Those naturally "transgenic" honeybees theoretically could be propagated to create stocks of virus-resistant insects, Lipkin said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070906/...awykf8T9Os0NUE

Sep 11, 1:56 PM EDT
Africanized honeybees appear established in N.O. area

MERAUX, La. (AP) -- More Africanized honeybees have been found in St. Bernard Parish, indicating that the fierce little hybrids sometimes called "killer bees" are probably established in the New Orleans area, the state agriculture commissioner says.

They were trapped about five miles down the Mississippi River from the spot where workers tearing down a house in January because of damage from Hurricane Katrina found a colony of the bees, Bob Odom said Tuesday.

The trap was about a mile south of Meraux and two miles southeast of Chalmette. It's close enough to the earlier find that the bees might be a swarm from the colony found in January, but might also have flown ashore from a passing ship or barge, he said in a news release.

"Although the exact source can't be identified, we have to assume Africanized honeybees are now established in the area and people should be careful when working outside," Odom said.

The Department of Agriculture and Forestry keeps traps along a north-south line through the state and at all deepwater ports to monitor the bees, which are smaller and more aggressive than the European honeybees raised for honey.

"Because Africanized bees have been labeled 'killer bees' for years, there's an idea around that they are bigger than European honeybees," Odom said. "The truth is they're actually smaller but a lot fiercer."

They have the same venom as honeybees, but attack in groups. Experts recommend that anyone confronted with Africanized bees find cover quickly.

Africanized bees are the result of an experiment to increase honey production in Brazil. A swarm escaped a lab in 1957 and headed north. When they mated with native strains, the offspring were as aggressive as the African parents.

They reached Texas in 1990 and have spread west to California and east to Florida. They were first found in Louisiana in Caddo Parish, in June 2005, and identified the following month. They have moved steadily east since then, and were most recently found near Pecan Island and Turkey Creek.


http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

Threats to bumblebees fly under radar
By JEFF BARNARD, Associated Press Writer
Mon Oct 8, 4:15 PM ET

GRANTS PASS, Ore. - Looking high and low, Robbin Thorp can no longer find a species of bumblebee that just five years ago was plentiful in northwestern California and southwestern Oregon.

Thorp, an emeritus professor of entomology from the University of California at Davis, found one solitary worker last year along a remote mountain trail in the Siskiyou Mountains, but hasn't been able to locate any this year.

He fears that the species — Franklin's bumblebee — has gone extinct before anyone could even propose it for the endangered species list. To make matters worse, two other bumblebee species — one on the East coast, one on the West — have gone from common to rare.

Amid the uproar over global warming and mysterious disappearances of honeybee colonies, concern over the plight of the lowly bumblebee has been confined to scientists laboring in obscurity.

But if bumblebees were to disappear, farmers and entomologists warn, the consequences would be huge, especially coming on top of the problems with honeybees, which are active at different times and on different crop species.

Bumblebees are responsible for pollinating an estimated 15 percent of all the crops grown in the U.S., worth $3 billion, particularly those raised in greenhouses. Those include tomatoes, peppers and strawberries.

Demand is growing as honeybees decline. In the wild, birds and bears depend on bumblebees for berries and fruits.

There is no smoking gun yet, but a recent National Academy of Sciences report on the status of pollinators around the world blames a combination of habitat lost to housing developments and intensive agriculture, pesticides, pollution and diseases spilling out of greenhouses using commercial bumblebee hives.

"We have been naive," said Neal Williams, assistant professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. "We haven't been diligent the way we need to be."

The threat has bumblebee advocates lobbying Congress to allocate more money for research and to create incentives for farmers to leave uncultivated land for habitat. They also want farmers to grow more flowering plants that native bees feed on.

"We are smart enough to deal with this," said Laurie Adams, executive director of the Pollinator Partnership. "There is hope."

Companies in Europe, Israel and Canada adapted bumblebees to commercial use in the early 1990s, and they are now standard in greenhouses raising tomatoes and peppers.

Demand is growing as supplies of honeybees decline, especially for field crops such as blueberries, cranberries, watermelon, squash, and raspberries, said Holly Burroughs, general manager for production for the U.S. branch of Koppert Biological Systems Inc., a Netherlands company that sells most of the commercial bumblebees in the U.S.

One new customer is Tony Davis of Quail Run Farm in Grants Pass. He has long depended on volunteer bumblebees to fertilize the squash, cucumbers, tomatoes and eggplant he grows outdoors for sale in growers' markets. When he started growing strawberries in greenhouses this year to get a jump on the competition, he bought commercial bumblebee hives to fertilize them.

"Without bumblebees, I would be out of business. I don't think I could hand-pollinate all these plants," he said.

Scientists hoping to pinpoint the cause of the nation's honeybee decline recently identified a previously unknown virus, but stress that parasitic mites, pesticides and poor nutrition all remain suspects.

Unlike honeybees, which came to North America with the European colonists of the 17th century, bumblebees are natives. They collect pollen and nectar to feed to their young, but make very little honey.

A huge problem facing scientists is how "appallingly little we know about our pollinating resources," said University of Illinois entomology Prof. May Berenbaum, who headed the National Academy of Sciences report.

Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, worries that on top of pesticides and narrowing habitats, disease could be the last straw for many of the bee species.

"It definitely could all come crashing down," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071008/...of_bumblebee_3

On the Net:

More on bumblebees: http://www.bumblebee.org

Africanized honeybees found in Louisiana
By JANET McCONNAUGHEY, Associated Press Writer
Thu Jan 10, 6:39 PM ET

NEW ORLEANS - Africanized honeybees have been found near Tioga, about eight miles north of Alexandria and 140 miles southeast of the Caddo Parish town where they were first discovered in Louisiana.

At their current speed, they're likely to cover most of the state by the end of next year, said Allen Fabre, coordinator for nursery and bee programs for the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry.

"I think they'll be to the Mississippi line by end of 2009," Fabre said in an interview Thursday. "Some beekeepers from Mississippi were in California for a meeting last week. I told them they're knocking on their door, and they know it."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory in Tucson, Ariz., confirmed that bees trapped in Tioga were hybrids of European and African species, a department news release said.

The department keeps a line of traps running north and south, spaced about two miles apart, to keep track of the bees' advance.

"After this recent positive north of Alexandria, the trap line located immediately north and south of Alexandria will be moved 30-50 miles east of the find," state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom said.

Africanized bees are the result of an experiment to increase honey production in Brazil. A swarm of the small, aggressive bees escaped a laboratory in 1957 and headed north. When they mated with native strains, the offspring turned out to be as aggressive as the African parents.

They reached Texas in 1990 and have spread west to California and east to Florida.

The first swarms found in Louisiana were in Rodessa, near Shreveport, in July 2005 and near Lake Charles the following month.

The bees are a bit smaller than pure European honeybees, but not enough to tell them apart by sight, Fabre said. Although the Africanized bees may attack in groups, they are unlikely to do so without some sort of provocation, he said.

Two swarms of hybrids were found last year in the New Orleans area, but the bees do not appear to be spreading from that area, Fabre said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080110/...suoASpjZSs0NUE

Bees Learn Thievery
Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScience
Tue Apr 29, 11:20 AM ET

Even the pinhead-sized brains of insects can learn new skills from their comrades - including theft.


It seems bumblebees can discover how to "rob" flowers of nectar, scientists now reveal. Normally bumblebees crawl into flowers to get nectar. In return for this sweet treat, blossoms coat the insects in pollen, which contains plant sperm. When these bees rendezvous with other flowers, they serve as couriers of this pollen, helping the plants breed.

However, bees can bite through the base of a flower to suck up nectar instead, avoiding the pollen altogether. Since they get something for nothing this way - drinking nectar without helping the flowers mate - such behavior can be seen as theft. The bees may commit such an act to get nectar from blossoms they could not fit into, or just to get more nectar than possible by normal means.

Now it appears that bumblebees can quickly learn how to rob flowers if they visit blossoms that others have already burglarized. The bees could learn how to commit such theft by themselves, but this was rare. But, after one bee learned how to rob nectar by watching its comrades, the skill rapidly spread to other bees.

It was long known that bees could learn simple facts from each other - such as where food is, for instance - but the discovery that insects can learn skills from others is a first. "It was actually first suggested in one of Darwin's journals. He saw bumblebees robbing flowers in a garden one day, and saw honeybees doing something similar afterward," said researcher Ellouise Leadbeater, a behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary, University of London. "That led us to our work."

The brains of bumblebees are a little larger than 1 cubic millimeter in size, or nearly one-millionth the size of a human brain. "It's interesting to see what you can do with a small brain," Leadbeater told LiveScience. "But then again, it may be that you just don't need to be very clever to learn a simple technique like this."

In the future, research could see if bumblebees could teach other species of bees how to rob nectar. Other insects that could learn skills from within or outside their species might include ants, Leadbeater speculated.

Leadbeater and her colleague Lars Chittka detailed their findings online April 23 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...7FAo6QqhezvtEF

Posted 05-07-2008, 11:50 AM by atprm

36.1% of nationwide commercial bees are dead
More commercial bee colonies lost

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- A survey of bee health released Tuesday revealed a grim picture, with 36.1 percent of the nation's commercially managed hives lost since last year.



Last year's survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America found losses of about 32 percent.

As beekeepers travel with their hives this spring to pollinate crops around the country, it's clear the insects are buckling under the weight of new diseases, pesticide drift and old enemies like the parasitic varroa mite, said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the group.

This is the second year the association has measured colony deaths across the country. This means there aren't enough numbers to show a trend, but clearly bees are dying at unsustainable levels and the situation is not improving, said vanEngelsdorp, also a bee expert with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

"For two years in a row, we've sustained a substantial loss," he said. "That's an astonishing number. Imagine if one out of every three cows, or one out of every three chickens, were dying. That would raise a lot of alarm."

The survey included 327 operators who account for 19 percent of the country's approximately 2.44 million commercially managed beehives. The data is being prepared for submission to a journal.

About 29 percent of the deaths were due to colony collapse disorder, a mysterious disease that causes adult bees to abandon their hives. Beekeepers who saw CCD in their hives were much more likely to have major losses than those who didn't.

"What's frightening about CCD is that it's not predictable or understood," vanEngelsdorp said.

On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff announced that the state would pour an additional $20,400 into research at Pennsylvania State University looking for the causes of CCD. This raises emergency funds dedicated to investigating the disease to $86,000.

The issue also has attracted federal grants and funding from companies that depend on honeybees, including ice-cream maker Haagen-Dazs.

Because the berries, fruits and nuts that give about 28 of Haagen-Dazs' varieties flavor depend on honeybees for pollination, the company is donating up to $250,000 to CCD and sustainable pollination research at Penn State and the University of California, Davis.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/05/06/d...=ib_topstories

New clue found to disappearing honey bees
Mon Aug 24, 7:03 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Researchers have a new clue to the collapse of honey bee colonies across the country — damage to the bees' internal "factories" that produce proteins. Theories about the cause of bee colony collapse have included viruses, mites, pesticides and fungi.

The new study of sick bees disclosed fragments of ribosomal RNA in their gut, an indication of damage to the ribosomes, which make proteins necessary for life, according to a study in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

RNA, which is made from DNA, is central to protein production.

The sick bees suffered an unusually high number of infections with viruses that attack the ribosome, the researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported.

"If your ribosome is compromised, then you can't respond to pesticides, you can't respond to fungal infections or bacteria or inadequate nutrition because the ribosome is central to the survival of any organism. You need proteins to survive," May R. Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at Illinois, said in a statement.

The researchers said the varroa mite, which was accidentally introduced to the U.S. in 1986, is a carrier of picorna-like viruses that damage the ribosomes.

The mite may act as a tipping factor leading to ribosome breakdown, the researchers said.

The study was funded by the Department of Agriculture.

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