Bee Afraid, Bee Very Afraid
The concern was, maybe this is a new disease. The bees were maybe dying away from the hive, and they were leaving their queen behind and all their babies behind. And what was really alarming to people, you think about one hive can produce a hundred pounds of honey, that's an irresistible temptation to all kinds of hive pests, but even hive pests were leaving these colonies alone. Now bees have periodically disappeared, since about the 1880s, every now and then bees mysteriously disappear. The disappearances in the past were very localized and very short term. So this particular disappearance, which we came to call colony collapse disorder, was unprecedented in its severity and its magnitude. By June of 2007, remember it started in November 2006, colony collapse disorder had been reported in at least 35 states. People were quite concerned. In fact there was a meeting for scientists that work on bees to prioritize research to figure out what was going on. The scientists thought the most likely explanations were a new disease, maybe pesticide poisoning -- Bees are very sensitive to pesticides; ill health due to management -- being put on trucks and driven across the country -- or just poor nutrition. Beekeepers are feeding their bees high fructose corn syrup, which is the stuff you drink in Coca-Cola, not so good for bees either. What did the public think? What didn't the public think? Various explanations offered for disappearances included and not limited to genetically modified corn pollens, cell phones, Wi-Fi, elevated carbon dioxide, elevate ultra-violet light, Osama Bin Laden, automobile growth, solar maxima, jet chemical contrails, mutant bee cannibalism, fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field, radiation from Chernobyl, alien abduction -- those were the explanations that nobody had any evidence for.
So, it's really important for scientists to get together and use modern tools to solve this mystery. And in fact, these are forensic tools, just like you see on the show CSI, in fact Gil Grissom, the character on CSI, the head forensic scientist, is an entomologist by training and in this episode he goes to a crime scene and he starts working on colony collapse disorder. In fact a lot of us were tuned in the CSI to figure out if Gil Grissom could solve this. So we don't exactly know how he went about it, but we know that there are all kinds of tools for forensic investigation. Forensic is just a word that means "legal" or "law", but a lot of people use forensic in the context of investigating death, so that's what we were doing. Deaths or disappearances, and we had, there are all kinds of tools for investigating mysterious deaths or disappearances, but they are all made for humans; they are not easily translated to working on bees. Among other things, what does Gil Grissom and his crew always do? They talk to people. Well, we couldn't talk to the bees, we couldn't really even check the bodies of the victims because there weren't any bodies. But we could use some of those tools, like a microscope, very basic tools. and it was very clear using a microscope, honeybees have all kinds of problems. Varroa, it's a parasitic mite, it sucks the blood of bees particularly when they're in the pupal stage, when they are metamorphosing or transforming from a grub to an adult, they can't move, they're sealed in their little waxed cells; and the mite is sucking its blood and the bee is helpless. So, can you imagine some creature on your body that's about the size of a lobster sucking your blood, so it's a very serious pest and it's particularly a pest, because just like mosquitoes can spread viruses like yellow fever as they suck blood, Varroa mites can spread viruses to bees. Eighteen different viruses affect bees. So the thought was maybe Varroa, which has been here in the U.S. since the 1980s, brought in a new virus. And sure enough using molecular techniques, a new virus was discovered. It was called Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. it's only been known since 2004; it was described in Israel. But it wasn't quite right. It's called Paralysis Virus because the bees are paralyzed, but these bees weren't paralyzed -- they were gone, they disappeared. But it was found in 83 percent of the colonies that were afflicted. However, biologists went into their freezers and collected samples that were healthy from years before CCD and they found this virus. So it can't have been Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus unless the virus mutated, because it's been here all along, we didn't just didn't know it was here. So more investigation with more microscopes turned up another disease of bees. This time it's a fungus. There are two types of fungi that infect bees. They're called nosema, and Nosema ceranae is a new virus that's been here since 1995; it basically turns the bees to goo. And they found it in a hundred percent of the sick colonies. So that's it, right? No, it's not: They found it in 81 percent of the healthy colonies. So the first few months of investigation, people kept finding things wrong with bees that were not the explanation for CCD. But what about pesticides that are used to control those mites? Beekeepers have been using pesticides in the hive. A pesticide is something that kills an undesirable organism, and a mite, is very closely related to a bee. So a chemical that kills a mite is very likely to kill a bee, too. So it's very hard to find a pesticide that kills only mites and not insects. Mites are arachnids, bees are insects. But they use one pesticide called Apistan; it's been in the hive, maybe that's what causing problems -- they are sensitive to the pesticide. Moreover, bees fly through all kinds of agricultural fields and are exposed to all kinds of pesticides. Maybe it was a new pesticide that was causing these problems. And in fact there is a new pesticide; it's only about ten years old, a group called the neonicotinoids. Everyone knows what nicotine is, right? It's in tobacco, it's a nerve toxin, it's a neurotoxin. Kids: Don't smoke, it actually screws up your nervous system. Well that's what this new pesticide did, and people in France, beekeepers in France were convinced that this was causing the mysterious disappearances of bees. It actually causes brain damage in bees. It makes them forget. What does a bee have to remember? Well the way home among other things, So the bee keepers in France were absolutely convinced it had to be this new pesticide, Imidacloprid. It's got a long name called Imidacloprid, and they banned it for use in sunflowers, a big crop in France. Bees love sunflowers. The neonicotinoid, the Imidacloprid, shows up in the pollen and nectar. The French beekeepers thought, "That's how they are getting poisoned; we'll ban this pesticide." What about in the U.S.? Well France banned the pesticide; they still have colonies disappearing. Imidacloprid has been here for ten years. Why didn't it cause disappearances? And finally, when chemists started using another forensic technique, a machine called a GC mass spect, Gas Chromatograph, looking for pesticide residues in the afflicted colonies, they found only three out a 108 pollen samples with this chemical that was suspected. Well that can't be it either. So, we can almost just about rule out the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, the nosema fungus, the neonicotinoid pesticide. Well we're narrowing things down, but we still don't know what it is. Well in October 2006, right before colony collapse disorder hit, a new tool became available for forensic investigation and that's the honeybee genome. The genome is the genetic blueprint, the DNA instructions for making an organism. And the whole thing, all 10,000 genes in a honeybee genome, were all sequenced and annotated and available. So this is my student Reed Johnson who's the first person to use new molecular methods to find out what was going on inside the bees by looking at their genes. And he used a technique called microarray, whole genome microarray. It's a little glass slide that has little dots on it, little dots of DNA. Each dot corresponds to one gene. Every single gene in the honeybee genome is on that slide. So what you can do is use this microarray, this little array, to see which genes are being turned on and which are turned off in the honeybee. It's called gene expression -- whether a gene is turned on or turned off. The idea is, if they are exposed to a pesticide, the genes that code for enzymes that break down pesticides will be turned on. If they're exposed to a new disease their immune genes will be turned on, just like if you're exposed to a disease, your immune system gets activated. So Reed looked at the microarray of healthy bees and sick bees and colony collapse disorder bees to see if there was a difference in which genes were turned on and which were turned off. He compared healthy bees, and that was hard; we didn't know where the healthy bees were. So we actually had to use bees from the freezer from 2004 and 2005 to absolutely know that they didn't have CCD, because there was no CCD then. He ground them up, extracted their DNA with their genetic material, and looked to see which genes were turned on and which were turned off. What did we find? A lot of genes. So we looked for the genes that were expressed differently in healthy bees and in colony collapse disorder bees and we found a mixture. We found that some other genes for detoxifying pesticides were turned on, some were turned off, some of the genes that help bees fight off pathogens were turned on, others were turned off. And the biggest, most definitive category that we found clearly associated with colony collapse disorder, we don't know what those genes do. But we know that they are markers for the disease, for this phenomenon, and when we figure out what those genes do, we'll know what's causing colony collapse disorders. So, we haven't ruled out any of the possibilities, but now we do have some tools, some molecular tools we can use to diagnose colony collapse disorder.
Now anybody who watches CSI knows that Grissom can wrap these things up in two episodes, max. So here we are, it's been since October 2006, and we still don't know exactly know what's going on. There are lots of people working on this. We have the genetic footprint of colony collapse disorder, and we're trying to figure out what it is. The next question is: How can you help? How can you help stop these losses. Well, we plant acres and acres and acres of one particular crop. Bees are used to going from one flower to another; they feed on hundreds of different flowers. We've changed the landscape so and kept things so free of weeds, there's nothing for them to eat. So one thing you can do is plant a garden, plant flowers, plant food for the bees. Another thing you can do is don't be afraid. People have very mixed feelings about bees. Yes at one end there is a stinger; yes, they can sting if you disturb their hive -- that's the only reason they'll sting or, if you step on them by accident. But each bee can sting only once; then she dies. They're not particularly anxious to inflict pain on you. They will be perfectly happy if you go away. Learn to appreciate bees, just keep your distance, they won't bother you if you don't bother them. And if you look at them as your allies and not as your enemy that also will help the bees. Finally, you could be a beekeeper. It's not so hard, universities all across the country offer courses; you can order the materials, and you can be the first person on your block to have 30,000 pets.