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.
re: LearDog’s comment that “I’m struggling to comprehend how (after decades of missing bees) – no entomologist looked at the bodies…?”
First, it wasn’t decades. The term Colony Collapse Disorder was not even coined until 2006 when an unusually high number of colonies dies (some die every year) and did so in a pattern that is not usually seen by beekeepers. While some beekeepers now think that this may have occurred in prior decades, if so it is a very intermittent phenomenon.
Second, the nature of Colony Collapse is that there are no dead bodies to examine. That is one of the defining characteristics of the disorder. In a CCD-colony, you go in a few weeks from a strong, outwardly-healthy colony with a normal mix of castes and ages to a “stub” colony with a queen, a handful of workers and brood. That existence of the queen and brood is perplexing because most colony-death situations take them out first, leaving the workers for last. The workers were not dead in the immediate vicinity of the colony either.
No one knew where the workers went in a CCD-colony. Maybe they absconded somewhere. Maybe they were eaten by skunks or bluejays. Maybe they died of a pesticide so toxic that they never made it back to the colony. More likely, they died somewhere away from the colony. But since a bee forages as much as 2 miles from its home, a forage area on the order of 5 E 10 square inches, and since the bee carcass is less than .2 square inches – well, finding a needle in a haystack would be comparatively easy.
The dead bees collected by Dr Hafernik were a bit of a fluke – not collected in the interest of evaluating CCD but merely to feed his praying mantis. So, no, I do not see evidence of confirmation bias in this story. Merely a recognition that serendipity is more important to scientific progress than many of us would like to admit.
Mike,
Just as I said, workers apparently “get lost” and do not return to the hive.
I have a solution for all the Al Gore wannabes who are trying their best to take over the whole economy and see yet another one of their cherished myths going down in flames. . . .
All you have to do is conclude that these new little bugs that bite bee’s backs. . . . .thrive on carbon dioxide!!
The facts are unquestioned:
1) carbon dioxide is higher than it was before and
2) honeybee hives are collapsing, possibly because of Apocephalus borealis.
Therefore, there can be no question that the flies are thriving because of. . . . . carbon dioxide. The science is settled, and Al Gore should be made absolute dictator of the world and war done away with, because the only reason we have higher levels of carbon dioxide is because of the wicked, wasted ways of the capitalistic west that burns all that coal.
The added advantage of this approach is you can avoid all those unpleasant, unkind, and perplexing questions raised by the denier community.. . . . .
Thanks very much E.M. (January 8, 2012 at 9:35 am)
I’ve been a Pentax man since the brand was recommended over Nikon and Canon by a fellow airman while we were serving in N. Japan back in the 60s, keeping tabs on the Red Bear. (Or almost as long as I’ve been chomping down on, and sometimes grinding, a bunch of mercury amalgam filled molars and wisdom teeth, which date back to the 50s.)
Canon was making the Pellix at the time, and the big Nikon F was favored by many pros, but Pentax has always appealed to me based on their relatively small size, good handling, excellent optics (Asahi was first and foremost, an optical company), and very high bang for the buck. Plus, there’s the very appealing maverick factor — not doing what everyone else is doing.
As for the Honey Bees, and to augment Mike Rossander excellent comment (January 8, 2012 at 11:33 am), apparently one effect of the embedded larval parasite on the bee is to cause the host bee to fly at night, and, atypically for bees, to be attracted to lights during these nocturnal flights, which may be their last ones. The dying bees from CCD are far from the hive when they give up the ghost, in the form of the new adult fly.
Message from Joe Derisi on Media craziness: phorids and bees
It looks like the media has really run with the whole zombie-bee phorid thing. Charles and I are authors on that paper, but I want you to know that we do not agree with the statements being made in the press and by others, claiming that phorids are even remotely responsible for colony collapse.
You may hear from your stakeholders that are listening to the popular press today. The media is way over-hyping this story.
Joseph DeRisi
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
UC San Francisco
A message from Joe Derisi, one of the authors of the paper in question, was recently posted on BEE-L. I think it will be of interest here, too.
(quote begins)
Subject: Media craziness: phorids and bees
It looks like the media has really run with the whole zombie-bee phorid thing. Charles and I are authors on that paper, but I want you to know that we do not agree with the statements being made in the press and by others, claiming that phorids are even remotely responsible for colony collapse.
You may hear from your stakeholders that are listening to the popular press today. The media is way over-hyping this story.
Joseph DeRisi
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
UC San Francisco
(quote ends)
To the moderators – Sorry, looks like Juanse beat me to the “save” button. Please ignore my duplicate.
Juanse Barros says:
January 9, 2012 at 8:01 am
“…Charles and I are authors on that paper, but I want you to know that we do not agree with the statements being made in the press and by others, claiming that phorids are even remotely responsible for colony collapse…”
Thanks for the clarification, Joseph, but your remark has left me a little confused. I’ve read through most of your paper twice, and what I take away is that the phorids are having a fairly significant effect on honey bee behavior, which seems at odds with what you have written, above.
Could you provide a more definitive statement on what role the parasitic flies are playing in CCD?
Thanks in advance.
~
Also, for those who will not or haven’t read the paper, my statement above
is in error, since the it is the larval instar that emerges from the dead or dying bee, not the adult fly. The larvae pupate away from the dead bee.
Bayer CropScience’s Clothianidin is being used as a pesticide on flowering crops in much of the world after Bayer suppressed, altered and flat out fabricated information that it wasn’t extremely lethal to bees.
Their US EPA study put two hives nearly next door to each other in the middle of two fields, one treated with seedcoat and the other not. The death rate was uniform between the two hive sets simply because both hives were consuming the same ratio of poison.
Clothianidin was banned in Germany after a seedcoat trial of less than fifty acres killed more than 350,000,000 bees. These bees weren’t killed by collecting pollen from the plants but were destroyed simply by being in contact with environmental levels of disturbed seedcoat dust from the planting process.
Clothianidin is EXCEPTIONALLY lethal to bees. It is being marketed in the US as a lawn-only pesticide, these often mistakenly used as ornamental and flowering fruit tree pesticides by residential owners. The LD50 is so low for bees that a single application as directed even twice the residual period before flowering will cripple hives which utilize the tainted pollen.
It is most certainly NOT the cellphone system that is killing bees. We’re actually approaching a level of background toxicity in several States that can easily decimate hive population and the unconsumed residual lasts on inside the honey itself.
No studies have been done to determine residual duration inside the preserving nature of honey, we can only assume it greatly extends the window of toxicity.
There’s a truly outstanding example of uninformed “reporting” in the UK Guardian today. Claire Thompson writes about CCD, mostly blaming a pesticide, but completely missing the well-publicized news about the parasitic fly. Pesticides don’t explain colonies that completely disappear; the behavior-changing fly specifically explains that phenomenon.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/13/honeybee-problem-critical-point?intcmp=122
Nicotine-based pesticides in widespread use by farmers are implicated in the mass deaths of bees, according to a new study by US scientists.
( http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/environment/scientists-link-mass-death-of-british-bees-to-farm-pesticides.1326596745 )
But did the “zombie flies” lay their eggs BEFORE, or AFTER the deaths of the bees? It is unclear from the article– it is fairly common for some flies to lay eggs in dead or necrotizing animal flesh– is there enough evidence yet to show if the “zombie flies” are any different?