Montana researchers and the Army find likely cause for bee Colony Collapse Disorder

In May we reported U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists were pointing to the combination of a fungus and family of viruses as the probable cause for the devestating Colony Collapse Disorder affecting bee populations across the country. Now additional research from Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana has identified the fungus tag-teaming with a virus that researchers believe causes CCD, Kirk Johnson of The New York Times reports. The report was published in the online science journal PLoS One.

Researchers said their joint effort may be "the first time that the defense machinery of the post-Sept. 11 Homeland Security Department and academia have teamed up to address a problem that both sides say they might never have solved on their own," Johnson writes. Scientists led by Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana in Missoula had previously worked for the military in bee-releated research, including a way to use honeybees in detecting land mines. "Together we could look at things nobody else was looking at," Colin Henderson, an associate professor at the University of Montana’s College of Technology and a member of Dr. Bromenshenk’s "Bee Alert" team, told Johnson.

Bromensenk's team, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, concludes in the paper "the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied," Johnson writes. "Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal." Still further research is needed to determing how the fungus and virus interact. "It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first," Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — "nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power," Johnson writes. "They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment," he said. "They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies." (Read more)