Possible Cause of Bee Die-Off Is Found

The paper:<p><a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013181" rel="nofollow">http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...</a>

Entomologists don't do bee autopsies, they do bee necropsies. The only animal that can be autopsied is a human. &#60;/pedant&#62;

How funny. Twenty years ago I worked for a summer for that guy at the University of Montana grinding up bees and writing data collection/analysis software.<p>edit: One of the projects I worked on looked at to what extent bees aggregated environmental pollutants into the hive. To prepare the bee samples for mass spectrometer, we ground them up, mixed them with aqua regia (mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids) in a nonreactive teflon container (a teflon bombs) and then microwaved them! Science is awesome. One of the bombs exploded once and the acid gutted the inside of the microwave.

The last I had heard, researchers believed that cell phones were at least partially to blame, but the article doesn't seem to mention it at all. Does anybody know if that has been disproved?

Skimming through the paper ( <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013181" rel="nofollow">http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...</a> ), I don't know that the mass spectrometry they did really required a military-academia connection, as the article seems to imply. While the machines certainly aren't everywhere, I would imagine that there are quite a few in the hands of researchers who aren't paid by the DoD.

I thought they figured that out at least a year ago. I guess it was just a hypothesis then.

Very much a 'symptoms and not the causes' analysis. This doesn't really answer anything. It's like finding out a virus causes AIDS and not noticing it's spread through frequent promiscuous sexual contact.<p>What they should be reporting on is: if this is dietary in some way, what has changed the diets of bees? Why are they catching this disease now, and not 20 years ago? What has been changing regarding the environment of bees?

Checkout Michael Schacker's book 'A Spring Without Bees.' Though it is a bit one-sided, he makes a compelling case for the pesticide Imidacloprid (IMD) being a significant factor in the honey-bee decline (I don't have it on hand, but I think he cites a study that shows that IMD "intoxicates" bees at as low as 6 ppb).<p>French beekeepers have been saying it was IMD for years and even though the "official" studies (from Bayer, the manufacturer of IMD) say there is no negative effect on bees.<p>That said, since the French banned IMD in 1999 (for use on sunflowers and other crops) they've seen a decline in CCD.<p>I'm a part of a few online beekeeping groups and the general feeling about this NYT article is that yes, probably a fungus + virus is what is killing the bees, but why are they weakened to such a point that it is spreading so disastrously? And here pesticides, migratory stress (i.e. driving them all around the country to pollenate crops), feeding them large amounts of hfcs, and general overwork all seem to play a part in weakening colonies.

I don't think you need a login for the printable page - <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07bees.html?_r=1&#38;pagewanted=print" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07bees.html?_r=1&#...</a>

I worked in a wetlab or for a bioinformatics company writing software for 4 years. One of the things that completely shocked me when I started working there, and I think most people don't appreciate, is that taking a liquid and figuring out what proteins are in there is a very hard thing to do. Then the next step -- how much does my sample have of the things I've identified -- is also hard to do. Doing either of them inexpensively is harder still. People still work hard on those two questions today, and there is still room for significant innovation around those two questions.<p>Also, CSI style science, where you drop a sample into the magic machine and an answer pops out is... nonsense. These are some of the most finicky machines you've ever encountered -- you always end up doing baselining / calibration runs, etc. Often they involve skilled lab work to set up, calibrate, run, and determine whether answers are significant.

<a href="http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-10-14/living/17265958_1_california-almonds-almond-growers-almond-trees" rel="nofollow">http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-10-14/living/17265958_1_cali...</a> Great article on Almonds and Bees in case you weren't aware... over 50% of the bees in the US are shipped to California during growing season... pretty crazy. Wonder what the impact will be on almond prices.