The New Yorker has an article on bees this week. Excerpts:

One of the people that David Hackenberg called to tell about his dead
hives was Pennsylvania's state apiary inspector, Dennis van
Engelsdorp. Van Engelsdorp does not normally keep bees himself, but at
the time that I went to visit him, a few weeks ago, he had eight hives
in his yard, arranged in a horseshoe.

Van Engelsdorp, who is thirty-seven, has a bearish build, thinning
blond hair, and deep-set blue eyes. He lives in the woods about thirty
miles west of Harrisburg, in a one-room cabin with an unheated porch
that he sleeps on year-round. Like many people who started to hear
from Hackenberg last fall, van Engelsdorp wasn't initially very
concerned. He figured that the problem had to do with mites or—much
the same thing—with one of the many diseases, like deformed-wing
virus, that the mites transmit. (The fact that Hackenberg hadn't found
any dead bees was odd, but sick honeybees often leave the hive to
expire.) What convinced him otherwise was slicing up some bees that
Hackenberg brought from Florida.

Normally, if you cut open a bee its innards, viewed under a
microscope, will appear white. Hackenberg's bees were filled with
black scar tissue. They seemed to be suffering not so much from any
particular ailment as from just about every ailment. "There was just
so much wrong with them," van Engelsdorp recalled. "And there weren't
any mites."

* * *

Dr. Ian Lipkin is the head of the Jerome L. and Dawn Greene Infectious
Disease Laboratory at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public
Health.

At the time that I spoke to him, Lipkin had just sent off a paper on
C.C.D. to a scientific journal. He was reluctant to discuss its
contents, for fear of jeopardizing its acceptance, but he did indicate
that it contained what he considered to be a breakthrough. One
patho-gen in particular was, in his words, "highly associated" with
C.C.D.

"My speculation would be that this particular pathogen is a trigger
that takes an otherwise borderline population and throws it over the
edge," he told me. "I think that's what we're seeing." Lipkin
explained that the process of finding the pathogen responsible for an
outbreak was "the same whether we're talking about encephalitis or
diarrheal disease or hemorrhagic fevers or respiratory disease. You
put up a candidate and then try to tear it down. And, if you can't
tear it down, it's probably bona fide. That's how we do science." He
wouldn't tell me what kind of pathogen he was talking about in the
case of C.C.D., but soon I learned that it was a virus. I also learned
that it was suspected that the virus had entered the U.S. on imported
bees.

-- 
Peter L. Borst
Ithaca, NY
USA

http://picasaweb.google.com/peterlborst

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