At 12:00 AM 4/26/2007, you wrote:
>UCSF Sleuths Identify Suspects in Mystery of Vanishing Honeybees
>
>http://pub.ucsf.edu/today/print.php?news_id=200704251
Here is another article on the same issue.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/04/26/MNGK7PFOMS1.DTL,
Having read this article, I am confused, I admit. First, the article
states that this researcher used "genetic material taken from a
"collapsed colony" in Merced County". Is this a typo, I wonder? Would
anyone actually extrapolate data from a single hive, or even a single
beeyard to a possible "cause" for CCD? If the data really is that
limited, announcing this to the press as a possible cause for CCD
seems to me to be remarkably premature. Maybe Nosema ceranae is an
opportunistic secondary infection that was preceded by some other
issue that is the real cause for CCD? The paper on the university
website mentions a virus, but the sfgate article makes it sound as
though the researcher, DeRisi, is fairly confident it's Nosema. (I
also note DeRisi is a biochemist, not a bee researcher.) Why is he so
confident? "The bees must have been loaded with this stuff" he says.
But that means nothing, really, if they succumbed because of a
compromised immune system.
Next, we are told that "Government scientists who have been tracking
the phenomenon they call Colony Collapse Disorder were skeptical,
however, saying the parasite had been an early suspect in the bee
die-off but that they had concluded it probably was not responsible."
OK. Would love to know why they came to that conclusion, and maybe
even get DeRisi's reaction to their skepticism and the reason for it,
but instead we get a couple of paragraphs that hype the CCD problem,
and many paragraphs on DeRisi's background and some of the fancy
biochemical techniques used.
Bah. I am still confused. I want to know about bees, not SARS and
microarrays and shotgun sequencing.
Then we are told of research done in Spain with Nosema cerana.
Googling that, I find this article on Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosema_ceranae which does not actually
come out and say that this parasite is the cause of CCD, but
certainly implies that this is the author's viewpoint. The author
suggests that the symptoms are identical. WOW! But wait....
Back to the sfgate article -- finally, they talk to an actual bee
researcher, Jeffery Pettis, who says that large quantities of N.
ceranis have been found in large quantities in healthy hives. Oh.
Well I guess that answers one question, which is why government
scientists have concluded it is not responsible for CCD.
Now, I've just read this whole article and I am no less confused than
I was before (though I *am* considerably better educated on Dr.
DeRisi's career). But I do have questions. So I wonder if anyone here
knows more about the research done in Spain, and why the author(s) of
the Wikipedia article find it so compelling as a possible cause, and
how other bee researchers feel about the work done there. Since I can
just about guarantee I won't find those answers in any piece in the
media about CCD, I thought I'd post here and see if anyone would be
kind enough to reply...
Regards,
Diotima
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