The world’s supply of honey may not disappear after all. Working with the U.S. Army, a group of scientists investigating the widespread collapse of honeybee colonies all over the United States have discovered what’s killing them: a combination of a fungus and a virus.
How the discovery was made is a fascinating story.
Army scientists in Maryland were learning all they could about bees in the hope of using them to discover land mines. At the same time bee experts in Montana were grappling with the fact that over the past four years 20 to 40 percent of U.S. bee colonies had collapsed and that the fatality rate in those colonies was 100 percent.
Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified foods.
Army scientists en-tered the picture because they were developing ways to discover biological threats to human beings before they developed and caused wholesale deaths and illnesses.
A New York Times reporter discovered that two brothers helped foster communication be-tween the military and an academic. A chance meeting and a saved business card proved pivotal.
Charles Wick, a microbiologist working at the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, has a brother, David, who knew Charles was working on bees. When he saw a television interview of Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk of Montana about his research on the bee death mystery, he put his brother in touch with Dr. Bromenshenk and the two combined their re-search.
Working as a team, university scientists and military scientists discovered that the virus that had been identified as a bee killer and a fungus were both present in every collapsed bee colony
It apparently took both to kill a colony.
The discovery is giving beekeepers a way to protect their hives with anti-fungal and anti-virus sprays.
The research is not yet complete. It is still not known how the fungus and virus kill the bees. They have learned, however, that the virus is DNA-based and a link between it and the fungus has been established.
Army scientists discovered the virus using a software system that is designed to test and identify a virus or other microscopic life based on the proteins it is known to contain.
The scientists say that “the power of that idea is immense because it allows the researchers to use what they already know — the properties
of proteins in a given sample — to find something they did not even know they were looking for.”
What the military teams are looking for “is to have detection capability to protect the people in the field from anything biological,” said Charles Wick.
BECAUSE honeybees play an important role in the pollination of fruit tree blossoms and other flowering plants, this research which may lead to a total revival of honeybee production is good news for everyone who enjoys fruits, nuts and flowering trees.
It also is news of particular interest to Kan-sans, because the federal government is in the process of creating a scientific research center on the campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan, which will have as its mission the protection of people and do-mestic animals from biological agents.
Just as this good news story grew partly from government research done at Edgewood in Maryland, it will only be a matter of time before work done at Manhattan will produce equally good news for Kansans — and the rest of the world.
This story and the exciting prospect of more to come should cheer us up: Mankind is capable of much more than making a mess of things. But one must look in the right places to find the evidence.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
