Tracking Down a Culprit

Tracking Down a Culprit. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Scientists from the USDA and University of Illinois have found a promising lead in the mystery of honey bee colony collapse disorder or CCD, which has wiped out about a third of the nation's colonies every winter for three years. Jay Evans, a bee researcher at USDA's Bee Lab in Beltsville, Md., says why viruses may be a prime suspect involved in the reduced protein production found in bees during colony collapse.

EVANS: Some sort of pathogen like a virus is a strong candidate because we know virus’ do interrupt physiological events like protein production so there’s a possibility that either the virus itself or even an immune response to that virus is having a negative effect on the bees and driving it. It still doesn’t rule out that it’s a chemical or say a pesticide or something in the outside world or even nutrition. They could actually were they to have very poor nutrition that might trigger something like this but we’re leaning towards it being some sort of pathogen.

Evans describes what new research has found as to what is happening inside bees during colony collapse disorder.

EVANS: What we did was to screen the bees themselves both ones that apparently healthy and their colonies were healthy and ones at various stages of collapse and especially at the end of what we’re calling CCD and toward the end the bees seemed to be losing their ability or changing the way that they made new proteins. The whole machinery involved with that seems to be not functioning in the traditional way that we think of it working.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.