Better Late Than Never

Looks like scientists are getting closer to discovering the real cause behind colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon where worker bees abruptly disappear from their prospective hives, and it doesn’t appear to be crop treatments or cell phone towers. Since 2006 honey bee colonies worldwide have drastically declined. With bees being of primary importance for the pollination of agricultural crops scientists have been working to discover the cause of the syndrome. Now, out of sheer happenstance, a biology professor in California collecting dead bees around his university for another project discovered strangely enough a parasitic fly larva emerging from the dead bees. Stranger yet is that scientists hadn’t considered this particular parasitic fly as the culprit in honey bee colony collapse disorder since it had already been previously documented as parasitizing bumblebee and paper wasp populations. Scientists are also wondering now if this parasitic species of fly isn’t also spreading other parasites and viruses into bee hives as well. It certainly seems to be one of those “well duh” moments for science, but better late than never for the bees.