> Does this imply that viruses are 'steering' the behaviour of honey bee colonies?

People have speculated as much, but this work tries to find real evidence for it. She writes:

> These results present the first observed instance of potential adaptive virus-manipulation of honey bee behavior. 

... honey bees themselves may not have quite adapted to the apiary, their
pathogens, including viruses, have. In the interaction between the honey bee and
IAPV, it appears that virus infection may cause altruistic transition to out-of-hive
tasks (e.g. induced hyperactivity); however, if these IAPV-infected bees happen to
drift in the process of doing such tasks, they will be more likely to infiltrate new
colonies. We see here that the virus may in fact be twisting an ordinarily beneficial
host response to one obviously beneficial to the virus in the context of drifting
between colonies. In fact, it is possible that rising incidences of colony loss due to
disease could be related to pathogens adapting to take advantage of the practices
humans have designed to rear honey bees. Indeed, crowding in populations of many
species, including eusocial insects, elicits increased both pathogen transmission and
virulence (reviewed in Fries and Camazine, 2001). It is possible that other rapidly
evolving pathogens (such as unicellular fungi, (Z. Huang, personal communication))
may have similarly adapted to the novel conditions of the apiary and large scale
migratory beekeeping and are, in turn, pathogens causing havoc they would never
accomplish in the natural habitat of the honey bee.

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