The Bee Conundrum aka Did We Screw Everything Up (Again)?

Headway has recently been made in the investigation of colony collapse disorder as experienced by the honeybee. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)is a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive abruptly disappear (yeah, very specific, right?). While such disappearances have occurred throughout the history of agriculture, there's been a recent widespread escalation in the occurrence. The term "colony collapse disorder" was first applied to a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of Western honey bee colonies in North America in late 2006.[2] Colony collapse is economically significant because many -most- agricultural crops worldwide are pollinated by bees -if you want to take a more anthropocentric point of view.

More recently, an American study involving collaborating scientists from multiple U.S. universities studied eight bumble bee species from across the country for three years, paying special attention to changes in their distributions, genetic diversity, and infection rates. Their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to comprehensively survey bumble bee populations in the U.S. The team compiled a database of more than 73,000 museum records and compared them to current population assessments determined through intensive surveys of more than 16,000 specimens at 400 sites. The study was the first national large-scale survey of bumble bee population health and found that four of the eight species studied had declined by as much as 96 percent, and that their ranges had shrunk by 23-87 percent. There are 50 species of bumble bees in North America, the team studied 8 and 4 of those are in serious trouble.

Kind of a big deal.

While a cause has yet to be confirmed, the presence of the bumble bee pathogen Nosema bombi in the diminished populations supports previous hypotheses that the escape of N. bombi from captive pollination colonies is responsible for decimating wild populations. However, the paper cautions that more research is needed in order to determine whether the pathogen is capable of affecting a healthy population or simply taking advantage of ones already weakened by something else. Oh, and you know where N. bombi came from? Commercial hives. And so do you know who's responsible for exacerbating the problem? Give you one guess...