Discussion of Colony Collapse Disorder
By Alan Holdich
Sept. 13, 2007
This article addresses the ongoing phenomena called Colony Collapse Disorder in which literally billions of honey bees have wandered from their hives, completely abandoning them to die alone estranged from the colony for a reason yet to be determined.
What is called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) began to get the attention of Bee Keepers and the agricultural industry since 2006. According to some researchers, over 600,000 bee colonies have been lost, approximately 25% of all bee colonies in the U.S.
The alarming element to this disorder is the fact that our nation’s food supply is directly linked to the ability of bees to pollinate our crops.
Many theories have been posited to explain this disorder including the effect of cell phones, the use of pesticides, the varroa mite etc. But not until now has a scientific theory been postulated and tested which provides a viable explanation for this epidemic.
W. Ian Lipkin, director of the center for infection and immunology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health indicated that IAPV, or Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus “is a candidate for being a trigger for CCD” .
The current theory is that this virus came to the United States approximately three years ago via imported bees from Australia carrying the lethal virus since samples of this virus were found in samples of Australian bees.
Encouraging news is what entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University and Jeffery Pettis of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture have discovered and that is that CCD hives could be restored to health if the empty hives are irradiated with gamma rays and then restocked with fresh bees. This indicated to other scientists that infection was playing a large part in this disorder, and perhaps the myriad of other theories, although possibilities, could be set aside to pursue the most likely culprit, IAPV.
Future studies will attempt to do a control study of the effects of IAPV to determine if the virus can be directly linked to Colony Collapse Disorder. If IAPV is indeed the culprit then there is hope of stemming the spread through selective breeding.
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