Back in 2007, Wired Magazine mused:
It’s only slightly less ridiculous than the other bee killing theory that year – cell phones.
I published a story about the loony idea that was proposed by some researcher in Europe about “cell phone radiation may be killing bees”. I pointed out that it was garbage then, as it is now. I thought it was so ridiculous that I made some spoof artwork on it:
Fast forward to 2012, it looks like the culprit for colony collapse disorder has been found and it has nothing to do with global warming. The best part? Some scientific serendipity.
“Zombie” Fly Parasite Killing Honeybees By Katherine Harmon, Scientific American Blogs
A heap of dead bees was supposed to become food for a newly captured praying mantis. Instead, the pile ended up revealing a previously unrecognized suspect in colony collapse disorder—a mysterious condition that for several years has been causing declines in U.S. honeybee populations, which are needed to pollinate many important crops. This new potential culprit is a bizarre—and potentially devastating—parasitic fly that has been taking over the bodies of honeybees (Apis mellifera) in Northern California.
John Hafernik, a biology professor at San Francisco State University, had collected some belly-up bees from the ground underneath lights around the University’s biology building. “But being an absent-minded professor,” he noted in a prepared statement, “I left them in a vial on my desk and forgot about them.” He soon got a shock. “The next time I looked at the vial, there were all these fly pupae surrounding the bees,” he said. A fly (Apocephalus borealis) had inserted its eggs into the bees, using their bodies as a home for its developing larvae. And the invaders had somehow led the bees from their hives to their deaths. A detailed description of the newly documented relationship was published online Tuesday in PLoS ONE.
…
The team found evidence of the fly in 77 percent of the hives they sampled in the Bay Area of California, as well as in some hives in the state’s agricultural Central Valley and in South Dakota. Previous research has found evidence that mites, a virus, a fungus, or a combination of these factors might be responsible for the widespread colony collapse.
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Here’s the paper, it is fully open and free for viewing:
A New Threat to Honey Bees, the Parasitic Phorid Fly Apocephalus borealis
Andrew Core1, Charles Runckel2, Jonathan Ivers1, Christopher Quock1, Travis Siapno1, Seraphina DeNault1, Brian Brown3, Joseph DeRisi2, Christopher D. Smith1, John Hafernik1*
1 Department of Biology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, United States of America, 2 Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America, 3 Entomology Section, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, California, United States of America
Abstract
Honey bee colonies are subject to numerous pathogens and parasites. Interaction among multiple pathogens and parasites is the proposed cause for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a syndrome characterized by worker bees abandoning their hive. Here we provide the first documentation that the phorid fly Apocephalus borealis, previously known to parasitize bumble bees, also infects and eventually kills honey bees and may pose an emerging threat to North American apiculture. Parasitized honey bees show hive abandonment behavior, leaving their hives at night and dying shortly thereafter. On average, seven days later up to 13 phorid larvae emerge from each dead bee and pupate away from the bee. Using DNA barcoding, we confirmed that phorids that emerged from honey bees and bumble bees were the same species. Microarray analyses of honey bees from infected hives revealed that these bees are often infected with deformed wing virus and Nosema ceranae. Larvae and adult phorids also tested positive for these pathogens, implicating the fly as a potential vector or reservoir of these honey bee pathogens. Phorid parasitism may affect hive viability since 77% of sites sampled in the San Francisco Bay Area were infected by the fly and microarray analyses detected phorids in commercial hives in South Dakota and California’s Central Valley. Understanding details of phorid infection may shed light on similar hive abandonment behaviors seen in CCD.
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Here’s the culprit exiting a dead bee, figure 2C from the paper:
It appears the commercialization of honeybees, and the tendency to truck them around the nation for pollinization contributed to the spread of the parasite. The researchers mapped the process:
Read the full paper in web browser here or as PDF here.
This episode reminds me of the wailing over toads being killed due to “global warming” only to discover later it was a parasite…or how about Penguins? Remember that one? Nutty Story of the Day: “Global Warming” is Killing the Penguins in Antarctica. Turns out there was no connection at all. The next time we see some journalist going off on global warming causing something to die, please remind them of these blatant failures in correlation is not causation.
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Never fear, the Warmistas will soon claim that the once harmless fly, held in check by cooler weather, is now multiplying more rapidly due to warmer climes and causing this devistation. Some enterprising AGW professor will no doubt get a grant to study the affect of warmer, less dense air has on the fly’s ability to, well, fly, and hence more easily find it’s bee target.
As a former hobby beekeeper, I keep an eye on honeybee populations. Numbers are indeed way down, but varying a fair bit yr-to-yr. This past summer there were practically none, but some did finally appear for the late-season goldenrod-aster bloom. This seems to be a pattern — several yrs ago the summer population was low but better than usual, and the fall-bloom produced quite large numbers. So the hives seem to recover somewhat by autumn, but whatever diseases/parasites are at work are decimating the populations over the winters.
Evolution marches on.
But I must say, that photo of the hyper-happy looking woman on the cell phone with that perfect caption is truly hilarious. Congratulations to whomever put that together.
The Bee Collapse hype that blamed global warming was almost purely a media response. All the papers I had read always implicated viruses and mites or some unknown disease. Colony Collapse Disorder was mostly a phenomena of the United State where honeybees are introduced and thus exposed to a wide variety of novel diseases and parasites. This exposure to novel disease is further increased by the rapid transportation of hives around regions of the country to pollinate agricultural crops. The industry spend billions on disease prevention from mites and the colony collapse was considered less of a threat.
My major complaints about the hype of global warming is that it misdirects funds and research from the real causes of wildlife disruptions. Environmental research stations have been closing down across the country and too much “research” is done by downloading satellite and temperature date and looking for statistical correlations insulated from real environmental study. The idea of global warming killing bees was purely speculative but spread through the media faster than a zombie virus. Real environmental knowledge comes from observation. The professor in this study John Hafernik taught an insect biology course for me at the Sierra Nevada Field Campus each year (and he still teaches classes there each summer that are open to the public), and despite being a believer in CO2 global warming, he is a superb biologist. What is just a dot zipping by to the lay person is readily recognized by Hafernik to the family or genus of fly, bee, beetle or other flying insect. He had collected bees and then later serendipitously observed parasites exiting the bees after they had been killed and that that provided the critical insight. Another co-author was a student my Advanced Placement Biology class. If you read any of the scientific literature on this disease and search for global warming, it can’t be found. For example “Honey bee colony losses” is online at http://frankycorp.wahost.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/histoire_ccd.pdf
It is the media that hijacks good conservation science to push a political global warming agenda. The media then abuses and misuses global average temperatures. Many of the colony losses were in 2009-2010 and people hyped that it as one of the warmest years on record. But if they looked at the local temperatures in the United States where colony collapses actually happened, temperatures were lower than they were in the 1930’s, and quite often lower than 2000. They hype defiles good science!
“This episode reminds me of the wailing over toads being killed due to “global warming” only to discover later it was a parasite…”
It could be argued that the whole AGW thingey was spread by parasites.
I think parasitic flys and wasps should be banned by the IPCC. It would be a major step forward and prove that the UN agency was doing SOMETHING.
People have short memories, but I remember seeing an informative documentary where alien parasites caused imense distress and hardhip to a group of human space farers. In fact, if it had not been for Ripley, things might have been much worse
So COME ON IPCC, and lets ban those parasites now
This is interesting that it took so long to figure out what was going wrong with the honeybees. If it takes that long to figure out that bees are being infected with fly eggs, how can anyone think understanding global temperature cycles is so well understood we can model it?
The next point is that honeybees dying is “different” and so global warming automatically makes the suspect list.I was reading a weather article recently, and they are now calling “El Nino” and “La Nina” events “anomalies.” If everything other than “average” is an anomaly, then everything is out of order all the time! Everything other than absolute average can be blamed on “Global Warming”!
Here is the definition of “anomaly”:
: deviation from the common rule : irregularity
: something anomalous : something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified
Are temperatures other than the absolute average “anomalous”? I would argue not!
Since it’s published in Scientific American – known for having gone round the bend a number of years ago – can we trust the paper?
/not really sarcasm
No, Its solar panels that are killing the bees. They get near them, get disoriented and can’t find their way back to the hive, so they die. That’s what I heard from the guy down the street who’s wife’s friends dad once lived next to a farm, so he would know.
Just shows that AGW is a has bee(n).
I will let Mike Rossander to do the heavy lifting on putting things straight with respect to CCD and the faith of european honey bees.
I will only like to point out that, at the same time that this Phorid fly paper appeared, there was this other one about Neonics, that didn’t receive any attention by the media.
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+plosone%2FPlantBiology+%28PLoS+ONE+Alerts%3A+Plant+Biology%29&utm_source=feedburner&articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029268
Multiple Routes of Pesticide Exposure for Honey Bees Living Near Agricultural Fields
Abstract Top
Populations of honey bees and other pollinators have declined worldwide in recent years. A variety of stressors have been implicated as potential causes, including agricultural pesticides. Neonicotinoid insecticides, which are widely used and highly toxic to honey bees, have been found in previous analyses of honey bee pollen and comb material. However, the routes of exposure have remained largely undefined. We used LC/MS-MS to analyze samples of honey bees, pollen stored in the hive and several potential exposure routes associated with plantings of neonicotinoid treated maize. Our results demonstrate that bees are exposed to these compounds and several other agricultural pesticides in several ways throughout the foraging period. During spring, extremely high levels of clothianidin and thiamethoxam were found in planter exhaust material produced during the planting of treated maize seed. We also found neonicotinoids in the soil of each field we sampled, including unplanted fields. Plants visited by foraging bees (dandelions) growing near these fields were found to contain neonicotinoids as well. This indicates deposition of neonicotinoids on the flowers, uptake by the root system, or both. Dead bees collected near hive entrances during the spring sampling period were found to contain clothianidin as well, although whether exposure was oral (consuming pollen) or by contact (soil/planter dust) is unclear. We also detected the insecticide clothianidin in pollen collected by bees and stored in the hive. When maize plants in our field reached anthesis, maize pollen from treated seed was found to contain clothianidin and other pesticides; and honey bees in our study readily collected maize pollen. These findings clarify some of the mechanisms by which honey bees may be exposed to agricultural pesticides throughout the growing season. These results have implications for a wide range of large-scale annual cropping systems that utilize neonicotinoid seed treatments.
Richard @ur momisugly 7.22:
I’ve been to Dubai many times and have only ever heard the ruler referred to as ‘Sheikh’. I will check.
I reiterate that ‘global warming’ can only means
THE ENTIRE GLOBE WARMS
Now that we know that most of the Southern Hemisphere never warmed,
and the recent cyclic Northern Warming has stopped,
can we stop using that propagandistic phrase?
Can we just answer the next survey with
‘No, there is and never has been any such thing.’
Because the insulative effect of CO2 greatly depends upon temp,
pressure, and humidity, it can only act locally, not globally.
On top of that, the radiative delta T per doubling is only 0.66C.
Gee, I’m supposed to be scared of 2/3 of a degree over the whole Earth,
which would barely register on my fever thermometer.
Worrying about that is little short of feeble-mindedness.
The word ‘Sultan’ might occur within the name but the first title is ‘Sheikh’.
Richard: This is the last entry from me on the subject of the bee-keeping sultan! The present ruler of Dubai is His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. I just wanted to be sure I wrote it correctly.
Mike Rossander says:
January 7, 2012 at 7:39 am
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Thanks Mike. After the exterminator removed the hive we removed all the dry-wall, vapor barrier and insulation, then cleaned all the wood with a bleach mixture. I pulled out 10-15 handfuls of dead bees as they take a while to die and we were told to wait 24 hours before completing the removal. I’m not sure what was used to kill the bees but I developed a mild rash on my arm where I came into contact with the hive while scrapping off the bits the exterminator missed. He wore gloves and had a long sleeve shirt.
Yes, feral bees would seem to be far off the topic of global warming but so would more frequent hurricanes, stronger tornadoes, deformed toads, extreme weather and all other things attributed to AGW. I am thankful WUWT doesn’t mind tangents. Thanks again.
O/T Annie and Richard. Sheik is a honorific term, and the term can also apply to a Muslim scholar of renown. Although a Sheik can rule/govern a province, the Imam has more authority on a religious basis that in a theocracy counts more. Sultan is often an inherited title for a Muslim ruler, as in the Sultan of Brunei mainly used in India, SE Asia. It depends on the Muslim region, but Sheik is the leader of a specific tribe. But a Sultan can be upgraded to King as in Saudi Arabia. Or of course we have Shah to, as in Shah of Persia.
I’m struggling to comprehend how (after decades of missing bees) – no entomologist looked at the bodies…? I’ve been working under the mistaken impression that all of the standard biologic and environmental vectors had been thoroughly investigated and dismissed.
Was this another example of comfirmation bias?
This sounds to me like a body snatcher, not a zombie.
On a lighter note, here is Dave Barry’s take on phorids:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/905915/posts
“What happens is, the female phorid fly swoops in on a fire ant and, in less than a tenth of a second, injects an egg into the ant’s midsection. When the egg hatches, the maggot crawls up inside the ant, and — here is the good part — eats the entire contents of the ant’s head. This poses a serious medical problem for the ant, which, after walking around for a couple of weeks with its insides being eaten, has its head actually fall off. At that point it becomes a contestant on The Bachelorette.”
I don’t know how scientifically accurate it is, but it is very, very funny.
As this is an open thread, I’m going to unload a bit.
At what point in our history did it become more important to be funny, than relevant? I don’t know how funny that is, but it is very, very relevant.
When I began to connect climate change with bee decline, I was immediately drawn to the reduction in magnetic flux, and the fact that bees use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate back to their hives.
I contacted national bee keeping societies, who,naturally, poo-pooed the idea.
So much for science.
Speaking of hype…
We keep hearing how without honey bees the global food supply would collapse. Yet some very large percentage of total foods grown in the world are either wind pollinated ( corn and other grasses, for example ) or are native to America where the honey bee is an introduced species ( ALL the squashes, tomatoes, potatoes and common beans for example) and some self pollinate before the flower fully opens ( common beans for example) though can also cross pollinate via bees (a source of contamination if trying to keep heirloom seeds pure). There are others, too. Figs are pollinated by a micro sized wasp.
Seems to me like an overdone fear hype.
In my garden (in the Bay Area which they show as having ‘the problem’) I’ve noticed in the last dozen years that the number of honey bees has dropped. Maybe about 1/4 what it once was. Yet the number of native bumble bee has gone up significantly. Each summer I see at least 3 different bee types in my garden, but 4 physical types. One, the California Valley Carpenter Bee has sexual dimorphism – the female is black and the male is a bright gold with green eyes, just spectacular.
http://entomology.ucdavis.edu/news/valleycarpenterbees.html
I’ve also noticed at least 2 fly types acting as pollinators and at least one tiny wasp may be pollinating or may be looking for flies as it is on the parsnips at the same time. ( Parsnips, in particular, get an odd assortment of small pollinators on them.) Oh, and the hummingbirds also pollinate some things. The sage, in particular, seems popular with them and the Carpenter Bees. Carpenter bees also really love the big flowers on squashes and pumpkins.)
At the end of the day, as much as I love honey, I find myself wondering: Just how critical is the honey bee, really, to food production? Convenient, yes. Helpful, very much so. But are there not a whole lot of other pollinators that would step in to take the nectar if the honey bee were to decline? The evidence of observations in my garden would say ‘yes’.
Is it just a ‘fruit thing’? Peaches and apples perhaps? Yet even there, my apple trees have bumble bees visiting…
So I really do suspect that the Food Scare is just that: Yet Another Hyped Scare.
Second Point:
We have an imminent threat of Africanized “killer bees” arriving in California. I see this going one of two ways: Either they are immune to the pests, so can replace the pure European Honey Bee as pollinator and honey maker OR they are susceptible and the buggers getting parasitized and dying off is a feature. Again, I’m seeing more of a ‘minor bother’ and less of an existential threat.
All in all it looks to me like the entire set of “scary scary” stuff around honey bees is just hype. A potential problem, yes, but far less than things our parents and grandparents dealt with on a regular basis. For my garden, the “solution” looks to be as simple as leaving a couple of dead logs laying in a corner for the carpenter bees to make a colony.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/of-bees-and-birds-and-sage/
Has pictures I took of some of the various ‘critters’ in my garden.
E.M.Smith says:
January 8, 2012 at 7:26 am
Excellent observations and comments!
The ladybird beetles are another pollinator and excellent pest control agent (here being stalked by some kind of tiny fly or wasp in my photograph).
True enough, some lady beetles were imported to control this or that, and a few are now considered pests, by some, but there are numerous native species, as well.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/splinx/5985333149/
@Steve P:
Glorious picture you took! Golly… looks like the Pentax is a pretty darned good camera… ( And me owning both Nikon and Canon…)
Oh, you are also right: I forgot to mention the lady bugs and a couple of other crawling ‘accidental pollinators’. I usually let a bag of them loose in the garden every year or three…