Finding a killer - Colony Collapse Disorder

Took a while but they seem to have found the Honeybee killer. From the New York Times:

Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery
It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees?

Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered �colony collapse.� Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Now, a unique partnership � of military scientists and entomologists � appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said � a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.

A bit more and the Army connection:

Dr. Bromenshenk�s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army�s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal.

�It�s chicken and egg in a sense � we don�t know which came first,� Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo � nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other�s destructive power. �They�re co-factors, that�s all we can say at the moment,� he said. �They�re both present in all these collapsed colonies.�

Research at the University of California, San Francisco, had already identified the fungus as part of the problem. And several RNA-based viruses had been detected as well. But the Army/Montana team, using a new software system developed by the military for analyzing proteins, uncovered a new DNA-based virus, and established a linkage to the fungus, called N. ceranae.

�Our mission is to have detection capability to protect the people in the field from anything biological,� said Charles H. Wick, a microbiologist at Edgewood. Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see what the Army�s analytic software tool could do. �We brought it to bear on this bee question, which is how we field-tested it,� he said.

The Army software system � an advance itself in the growing field of protein research, or proteomics � is designed to test and identify biological agents in circumstances where commanders might have no idea what sort of threat they face. The system searches out the unique proteins in a sample, then identifies a virus or other microscopic life form based on the proteins it is known to contain. The power of that idea in military or bee defense is immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use what they already know to find something they did not even know they were looking for.

The original paper can be found here: Iridovirus and Microsporidian Linked to Honey Bee Colony Decline Fascinating -- there are, of course, other kinds of bees that pollinate but Honeybees are the most prevalent because their honey is valuable and they are colonial. Bees like the Orchard Mason bee are great pollinators but they are solitary. It is sobering to think just how much of our food requires polination...