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...this was her reply to my query about the honeybee problem and any theories:
Yes. A hive seems to be doing well and suddenly all of the adults are gone. There is brood present, so they know adults were there recently, but no one to raise them. It's called Colony Collapse Disorder. Theories as to why it happens range from cell phone interference to viral diseases. There was recently a paper in the journal 'Science' (big wig journal) that showed correlations between Colony Collapse Disorder and a virus first described in Israel. The virus is something like HIV where the bees are weakened and are then susceptible to a bunch of other stuff. Their science was pretty shoddy, though, and there was no causation shown (also, it wasn't written by hard core bee people. I could go on, but I think you get the idea). What most bee people say is that the hives are just under a lot of stress and so a lot of things are doing them in. A huge problem everywhere in the world except Australia is mites (Varroa mites are the main bad things here). The mites get into the hives and parasitize the bees. Climate change is a problem, dumping bees into trucks and shipping them across the country is a problem, once one hive is infested with mites or viruses or whatever they can pretty easily infest others that are nearby, etc. I heard a lady speak who said that something like Colony Collapse Disorder happened in a certain part of the country last year and this year everything is fine, so we'll see how that pans out, I guess. In short, there is no one thing causing the problem. That seems to be the consensus. The U.S. government just dumped a tonne of money into honeybee research (which in itself is a bit shitty - there are many things that pollinate other than honeybees and if you're not working on honeybees you can't touch that money), so they'll likely figure it out eventually. They also recently mapped the honeybee genome, so they can do cool stuff like grind up a bee and look for any sort of foreign DNA. That's fairly new, and there are a lots of problems with it, but it's neat. But yeah. Same as everything else, humans doing a lot of things with nature that nature can't handle/isn't happy about.
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