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Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Bee Bedevilments: Colony Collapse Disorder and More


      Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) was one of the most striking mysteries in the news 11-12 years ago; honeybee workers were vanishing fast for no clear reason. To this day, that puzzle has never been entirely solved, researchers say.





     And perhaps it never will be. Colony collapse disorder has faded in recent years as mysteriously as it began. It’s possible the disappearances could start up again, but meanwhile bees are facing other problems.




     CCD probably peaked around 2007 and has faded since, says Dr. Jeff Pettis, who during the height of national curiosity was running the Beltsville, MD, honeybee lab for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Five years have passed since Dennis vanEngelsdorp, who studies bee health at the University of Maryland  has seen a “credible case” of colony collapse (see below in the lower part of the image.)




     Beekeepers still report some cases, but Dr. Pettis and Dr. vanEngelsdorp aren’t convinced such cases really are colony collapse disorder, a term that now gets used for a myriad of things that are bad for bees. To specialists, colony collapse is a specific phenomenon. An apparently healthy colony over the course of days or a few weeks loses much of its workforce, while eggs and larvae, and often the queen herself, remain alive. Also food stores in collapsing colonies don’t get raided by other bees as a failing colony’s treasures usually do.




      “I think I know what happened,” says Dr. Pettis, now in Salisbury, MD, consulting on pollinator health. His proposed scenario for CCD, like those of some other veterans of the furor, is complex and doesn’t rest on a single exotic killer. But so far, no experiment has nailed a proof.

     Looking back, Pettis realizes he had heard about what might have been early cases of CCD, described as colonies “just falling apart,” for several years before the phenomenon made headlines. Then in November 2006, Pennsylvania beekeeper David Hackenberg, as usual, sent his colonies to Florida for the winter. They arrived in fine shape. Soon after, however, many buzzing colonies had shrunk to stragglers. Yet there were no dire parasite infestations and no dead bee bodies in sight.




      “It was, ‘OK, something weird just happened,’ ” remembers Dr. Jay Evans of the USDA’s honeybee lab in Beltsville. “It looked like a ‘flu,’ something that kind of swept through miraculously fast.”

      No single menace, however, could be tightly linked to every sick colony, or only to sick colonies. Varroa mites, small hive beetles, Nosema fungi, deformed wing virus, unusual signs of pesticide exposure, for instance —screening techniques at the time just weren’t picking up a clear pattern in any of these bee bedevilments.




     Entomologists were hounded by the press, not to mention leaned on by politicians and pursued by would-be entrepreneurs. “For me, what made it rewarding,” Dr. Pettis says, “was that people were learning about the value of pollination.”

      A Columbia University researcher who had identified pathogens in mysterious human disease outbreaks looked at the problem. Dr. Ian Lipkin had never worked with bees, but he and his lab collaborated with entomologists and other bee specialists to search for any genetic signature of a pathogen appearing only in collapsing colonies. The approach of searching through mass samples, with their messy traces of gut microbes and random parasites, is now familiar as metagenomics. At the time, this way of searching for pathogens was groundbreaking, says collaborator Diana Cox-Foster, then at Penn State U. The resulting paper, in Science, pointed to several viruses, especially the previously obscure Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, or IAPVThat emphasis on IAPV, which got a lot of attention at the time, hasn’t held up well. “It’s not 100 percent ruled out,” Evans says. But the explanation’s main problem is shared by other threats proposed as a single cause of CCD. After finding IAPV or another presumed single menace in sick bees in one place, he says, “you could go to other apiaries that were collapsing and not find it, or you could find it in healthier colonies.”




      As an apiary inspector for Pennsylvania at the time, vanEngelsdorp monitored for signs of collapse in over 200 hives. “We tried to watch it happen but we couldn’t,” he says. None collapsed. Even finding the sickest bees in collapsing colonies was a challenge. Doomed bees presumably flew off in multiple directions, and birds or other scavengers usually found the bees before scientists could.

     Dr. Pettis now sees the disaster as a two-step process. Various stressors such as poor nutrition and pesticide exposure weakened bees so much that a virus, maybe IAPV, could quickly kill them in droves. Evans, too, sees various stressors mixing and matching. When pressed for his best guess, he says “all of the above.”



       Dr. Cox-Foster has managed to re-create part of the process, the vanishing effect that marked the end for stressed bees. When she infected honeybee colonies in a greenhouse with a virus, the sick bees left the hive but were trapped by the greenhouse walls before dispersing too far to be found. (Of course, this experiment doesn’t demonstrate how colonies with no sign of a virus died.



     That tendency for sick bees to leave hives, Dr. vanEngelsdorp proposes, could have developed as a hygiene benefit. “Altruistic suicide,” as social-insect biologists call it. Flying away from the colony could minimize a sick bee’s tendency to pass disease to the rest of the hive.

     Colony losses each year are still running higher than beekeepers say would be acceptable (gray bar in the image below). Even though hives can be split so numbers eventually build up again, the slowdown and expense raise the costs of pollination.





      Today, hive losses remain high even with CCD waning or gone, according to national surveys by the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit bee health collaboration. Beekeepers typically note that they either expect or can tolerate annual losses between 15 and 20 percent of their total number of colonies. Yet from April 2016 until March 2017, losses across the United States ran at about a third of hives. And that was a so-called good year, the second-lowest loss in the seven years with data on annual losses.




      Classic CCD may not be as much of a threat these days, but the “four p’s” — poor nutrition, pesticides, pathogens and parasites — are, says Dr. Cox-Foster, now at a USDA lab for pollinating insects in Logan, Utah. Coping with the four p’s may not fire the imaginations of armchair entomologists. But it’s more than enough of a challenge for the bees.

       Answer? Choose B (but it's still a confounding mystery.)

Bee well,
Steph

92 comments:

  1. C D B! D B S A B-Z B. O S N-D!
    D B S D-Z N M-T.
    S D B O-K? I C U X-M-N D B.
    Y S D B D-V-8-N? N N-M-L N-M-E?
    U R N X-L-N 4-M!

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    1. eco, almost as good as Morse Code!

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    2. With all credit to William Steig, the last book I read cover to cover.

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  2. Lego (and others), do you remember another meaning to CCD?

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  3. Completely unrelated, every time I see your thumbnail I imagine Milton Avery painting a Luis Barragán building, perhaps this one....

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    1. That's a detailed and cheery connection, eco. I can see/bee it!

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    2. Yes, if you turn the bee image 90 degrees and think of those bees as nuns--wow! The warmth of the yellows and oranges is most appealing.

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  4. Replies
    1. Pretty cool, though the comments at Roadtripper say it is a waste of time to visit.

      Speaking of time-wasting, I think I've mentioned The Dark Side of Oz, the only way I can watch that movie. The first 8 minutes are a bit dry, but starting with "Time" the synchronicities are remarkable, and "Great Gig in the Sky" is truly uplifting, as is the whole second side of the album.

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    2. Thanks for the link, eco. It was oz-some.

      And, never read the comments (except here and at Blaine's, of course ;-)).

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  5. I think we've talked about these
    Xs for the Corona Project, but I didn't know about this part:

    "Satellites with one (and later two) cameras loaded with 70mm film would orbit the planet, snapping pictures and periodically ejecting a pod of exposed film. As the film fell toward earth beneath a parachute, a passing plane would snatch it out of the sky."

    Did you?

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    1. I knew about the Corona satellites, including the mid-air recovery of the film canisters, but I don’t recall the concrete calibration crosses.

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    2. Seems a little odd that they had to construct something for calibration, why not use the known distances between known landmarks that can be seen from space? Large buildings, roads, bridges, dams, geographic features etc are in abundance.

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    3. I agree that they seem superfluous. Maybe McNamara had a cousin in the concrete business?

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    4. "Spy photos were flooding in — but the pictures were blurry. That's what the concrete X's were for. That grid out in the Arizona desert was used to calibrate the cameras on board the satellites."

      Pre GPS, of course.

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    5. I understand what they were doing, but it seems there are other landmarks that would be clear enough to use for marking distances. The distance between the landmarks need not be specifically 1 mile, it just needs to be known.

      I wonder if they wanted the grid to compensate for camera distortion? Professional architectural photographers use a perspective control lens to correct the appearance of, for example, the parallel lines of a tall building, which will converge when viewed from the street. Same distortion occurs on interior shots where a very wide angle lens is needed. These are expensive lenses (not a problem for the military, and it's not too late for Christmas/ Hanukkah/ Kwanzaa presents) but I think they have to be adjusted for the circumstance, and that's not convenient for rapid fire shooting from space.

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    6. Yes, eco, I think the 1 mile increments in two directions helped with the distortion. It's the only concrete idea I can see. Or the cousin idea, jan.

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    7. "The west arm has a manhole, with cement cover and rebar handles. Around the cover protrudes 6 equa-distant pieces of rebar. Gary Morgan, member of the Cold War Museum in Warrenton VA., emailed me to say he had seen somewhere that the pits may have been intended to hold laser lighting to give a more accurate fix on each target." I read here that the distances were accurate to the width of a pencil head.

      I wish I'd known about them when I gave a paper at a hydrology conference in Casa Grande, AZ, in 1989. It would have been a fun on-the-grid field trip!

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    8. I was wondering which part of a pencil is the head? Turns out, your reference says the distances were accurate to the width of a pencil lead. Which sounds ridiculous, but what do I know?

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    9. Head, lead, whatever, right? ;-)

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  6. Speaking of trivia, has anyone tried the HQ Trivia game/app? My wife and niece and I tried it out this weekend. It’s kind of fun to be on an interactive app with 1.5 million other people in real time. I wonder about the servers and bandwidth they need to support that?

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    1. Bandwidth? The width of a pencil lead? ;-)

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    2. But, no I have not tried that game/app. I will check it out this weekend.

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    3. I wonder how 1.5 million people have nothing better to do with their real time? The people at Vox are not enthusiastic, it looks like a semi-scam to me.

      But I have no apps, nor even a cell phone to waste my time, so maybe I'm not the best judge.

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    4. I just finished Fire and Fury last night with my real time. As I've said elsewhere, Wolff's writing is Scheherazadian (or strangely fabulous).

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  7. Replies
    1. I remember (thumbs in armpits time), I say I remember, way back in '82 or '83 we used to wake up at 3 in the morning and turn on the radio to see if the President had blown up the world. Funny thing, we're doing it again!

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  8. Replies
    1. jan, are you joining Reich's class?

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    2. I'm thinking of giving it a try. (This is the class my niece took during her last year at Cal.)

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  9. Replies
    1. I didn't know there were bison in Poland and Belarus!

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    2. Descendants of the aurochs, I believe. (Hence my tag line.)

      I love the "Gotta problem with that?" look on the cow's face. Reminded me of an old movie still, which I can't quite place, but this one is sorta close.

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    3. jan, I'd like to see the list of key words in your browser.

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    4. Couldn't you see that picture of the cow and bison as an album cover? (Do they still have album covers?)

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    5. Totally. Digital album "covers?"

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    6. Maybe it's the generation, but the cows reminded me of this image or this or even this. Or this.

      Time to put the albums away.

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  10. There a new largest discovered Mersenne prime. Makes me feel guilty that all my computer does with its spare cycles is warm my house, while it could be mining Bitcoin, or searching for near-Earth asteroids or extraterrestrial intelligence. Does anyone here have a useful background app they like?

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    1. jan, I have Amazon Prime. Would that count? ;-)

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    2. No. Nor would being infected with ransomware, like the attack that hit Allscripts last week and left everybody that uses it (including my practice) unable to prescribe controlled substances. But BOINC looks interesting. (No, not the fun Mary Roach book, available on Amazon Prime.)

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  11. Replies
    1. "Honey bees may be necessary for crop pollination, but beekeeping is an agrarian activity that should not be confused with wildlife conservation." >>> Agreed.

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    2. Several years ago we created Berkeley EcoHouse, a demonstration project for living in an urban environment - no credit or blame for the house, it was existing and we didn't have money for more than repairs.

      The back yard of the relatively small property (4600 sf) was designed with a mixture of food plants, water treating plants for the constructed wetlands greywater system (serves everything but the kitchen sink, and toilets) and native plantings. Entomologists from UC Berkeley were pleasantly surprised to see more than a dozen native bee species on this very small piece of land in the midst of a city.

      To me it shows that if we do a few restorative things, and mostly stay out of the way, nature will endure. Probably too optimistic.

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    3. Very cool. I like that there are human tenants there (as well as the bees).

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    4. Someone has to pay the rent. We also needed someone to let the ducks in and out of their safe house - raccoons are the nemesis. The ducks provide fresh eggs, free fertilizer, and non-toxic pest control. After we got them the tenant (a landscaper) estimated the snail population went from 500 to nearly zero. Kids (and adults) in the neighborhood would bring snails from their yard to feed the ducks.

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    5. Duck duty sounds fun. . .

      Just finished a long day helping hs juniors prepare for the SAT. They told me my eyes lit up when I talked about taking or grading tests ;-).

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    6. I hope their eyes lit up when you were talking about taking the tests.

      I remember being pretty lit up the night before I took the SAT's, and pretty hung over while taking them (bad attitude in a 16 year old). But I still got a 1380 (out of 1600), 620 in English not so good, 760 in math wasn't bad.

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    7. They are a fun group. But, they do not share my test enthusiasm. . .

      Wow, eco, your lit SAT scores are great. Did you ever wonder if you took them unlit?


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    8. Just to be clear, I was not lit when I took them, as Maureen McGovern once said. I thought about taking them again, but was too lazy, then as now. Though a friend scored a perfect 1600, and I was tempted to try ...

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  12. Replies
    1. I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Trump having moved the College of Electors to Rattlesnake Ridge. Isn't he always claiming to have taken the Electoral College by a landslide?

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  13. Well now there's another place (besides here and Blaine's) to read the comments. Or at least the reviews.

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    1. I can attest that Naturalamb condoms are excellent for feeding not only hematophagous insects, but also medicinal leeches. The difficulty was getting the P.O. through the State University of New York purchasing department.

      #ReviewForScience is an excellent idea!

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    2. A new hobby! Thanks for the heads-up!

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    3. I definitely don't think Jan should include your last bit in his P.O.

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    4. It might give someone in the Purchasing Dept. a good chuckle, though. . .

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  14. ". . .beautiful clean coal. . ." Gaaack!

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    1. I don't have a TV mounted on my toilet tank, so I couldn't watch it.

      I turned on the radio as he was spouting about the murderous immigrants. Now I'm afraid of most of my neighbors. And about 1/4 of my clients.

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    2. NY Times today:

      "And yet it’s precisely when he is trying to act like a normal president that he is least effective. Remember: The circus is his friend.

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  15. Replies
    1. Nice, but 40 years of technological advance didn't add much to the original.

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    2. The video is charming, did you know it is a repeat of the short film Powers of Ten? This was created in 1977 by the husband-wife architects (YAY!) Charles and Ray Eames (Ray was a woman). They are also well known for the iconic Eames Chair.

      And I'm very grateful for this reminder; a few years ago I found a $1 DVD of the films of Charles and Ray Eames, and the version of "Powers of Ten" was different than I remembered from childhood. So now I looked it up, and found this, titled A Rough Sketch, which is what I saw too many years ago. So you've cleared my mind on something, and now it can happily return to its "normal emptiness."

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    3. Dang, I was spending so much time watching the originals and finding the original original. I should have known Jan would beat me there. But I gave it context....

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    4. Thanks jan and eco. The concept seemed familiar and now I know why.

      Having the context with the husband-wife architects is great, eco. Glad to have helped with the normal emptiness, too.

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  16. I knew I should have made a left turn at Albuquerque!

    Some postulate that the population of this continent was as large as Europe before 1492, Mezzo-American cities had advanced sewage systems even as capitals of s***hole European countries were still dumping in the streets. I am still intrigued by the theory that the Amazon rainforest was created by human action.

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    1. Thanks, eco. Both are fascinating articles. I am tempted to have my SAT class read these instead of the pablum the College Board asks them to read for their essays.

      Long SATurday with high school juniors. But, lots of fun, too. They are quite wonderful and honest people.

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    2. Funny coincidence, we were doing assessments today for Rebuilding Together (formerly Christmas in April), and my board member/ colleague mentioned the article too. She then started talking about Charles Mann's book 1493. I've only read half of that, but I think his first book, 1491, should be mandatory for high school students. And adults too.

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    3. Both 1493 and 1491 look to be full of fascinating stuff; excited to explore glottochronology, tomatoes, and microbes further.

      Rebuilding Together also looks like a worthwhile adventure. "Christmas in April" is more memorable. . .but not as inclusive, I suppose.

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    4. I think you'll especially enjoy the discussion of the diverging evolution of immune systems - Europeans towards combating viral infections like influenza and smallpox, indigenous folks on these shores fighting parasitic infections. Hence gringos get Montezuma's revenge while 500 years ago the local "indians" had 97% of their population die within a few decades. The first nasty NAFTA. No more spoilers.

      I also think high school students, or perhaps younger, should read A People's History of the United States.

      And I think you captured the essence of the name change debate for RT, though that was before my involvement.

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    5. I'd read about the immune system differences, but I'm looking forward to learning more. It sounds like it is more lively than Guns, Germs, and Steel ; I enjoyed that book but it was a bit of a slog.

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  17. Replies
    1. Yes, thanks, jan, for another good article about the LiDAR discoveries. Amazing revelations!

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    2. Another fun factoid closer to home: at the Chaco Canyon "dump" (actually a debris pile of unknown purpose, but seems to be more than just trash) they found remains of pottery and other stuff that came from Peru. So the "Amazon" marketplace goes back much further than one would think.

      I can't remember if that's from the 1491 book discussed above or from reading about Chaco Canyon. Either way the trade routes speak to both economic sophistication and large numbers of FedEx runners.

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    3. "Midden" sounds a bit more enchanting, I think.

      "Amazon" was quite the name choice, eh?

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  18. New post on "Extensive Mid-Oceanic Magma Eruption at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Time Boundary" is now up.

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