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Government-bred super bees – a possible answer to the question: Who will save the honeybees?
About a third of our diet depends on the pollination of crops by honeybees, including many fruits, vegetables, seeds, beans and spices. Over the past 30 odd years, the honeybee population has been declining. So far, food production has not been gravely affected, but scientists, farmers and beekeepers have cause to be worried. The disappearance of honeybees, termed Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, is an acute agricultural threat in North America and Western Europe.
Photo by Erik Hooymans (Image source: wikipedia commons)
The latest mass die off of honeybees in the United States was unusual in that it was more rapid and more mysterious: bees disappeared suddenly and with little evidence of disease or parasites to warrant such a drop in numbers. Fortunately, the honeybee’s genome was recently decoded, which should help provide more clues regarding the mystery.
According to a Discovery News report from November 12th, U.S. Government scientists suspect that the varroa mite is responsible for CCR. The varroa is a honeybee parasite that has grown resistant to pesticides, carries viruses and is generally considered to be the top honeybee pest in the world. But a special breed of bees is fighting back.
‘Some bees have a low-frequency genetic trait termed varroa-sensitive hygiene (VSH) that enables them to better locate and remove varroa mites from hives. These bees team up to open the covered brood cells and remove the mite-damaged pupae and any accompanying varroa mites from the hive.’
–news.discovery.com
U.S. Government scientists are breeding these varroa-fighting bees in an effort to curb CCD. But all scientists are not equally optimistic about this possible solution to Colony Collapse Disorder and how resistant the specially bred honeybees will be in the long run remains to be seen.
Find out more background about this story by watching this video from Discovery News: Honey Bee Killer Hunted.
By Graham Land
Additional resources:
U.S. Government National Bee Unit
Tags: bees, CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder, honeybees, scientists, Varroa
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See more on CCD and the plight of the bees:
http://www.greenfudge.org/2010/08/08/honeybees-–-we-kill-them-with-pesticides-they-help-us-with-air-quality-control/
http://www.greenfudge.org/2010/10/11/colony-collapse-disorder-the-disappearance-of-the-honeybee/
I am not a bee keeper but I have always respected bees and help them if I can if I find them tired on the street as I believe everyone should do, peoples opinion of bees really needs to change, so often I see people swat them, kill them just because they are a bee and they may get stung but anyway, I can see the problem scientists have regarding bees dying, there is not just one factor there are many but to see if climate is a factor why don’t they put the hive in a controlled temperature environment like a fridge as I am sure I am not the only person who has noticed but frogs also come out of hibernation too soon, they are sleepy like the bees and are run over and such, as we seem to have a spell of warmer weather before winter is really over, then it is cold again. I also believe people should be encouraged to keep bees and wild bees also need to be encouraged to form.
Perhaps scientists really need to get back to basics, look at wild bees how they are living and compare to the domestic bee and see if our interference has somehow affected the bee.
I love bees and it distresses me that scientists are not killing them before they start disecting them, surely that is wrong and packing them to move about is not very good either they are not some sort of food source, they are a feeling living being, surely that has to be distressing for them.
Human beings always have to interfere, even with our own species, mother nature always knows better.
Surely the Varroa mite alone cannot be the cause of CCD. Varroa mite have been here for decades, but CCD is only relatively recent, so there must be some other factor as well as the mite to trigger CCD.
Still, this is an interesting finding, and who knows where it might lead.