Mystery of honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder is probably solved | Hacker News Reader

Mystery of honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder is probably solved

sciam.com

119 pointsdfranke27 comments

It's refreshing to see such care taken to avoid conflating correlation with causation. Even when faced with such a complex system, you can chip away at the mystery if you apply some discipline.

Although I am a little curious about some of the less-mainstream theories: "Other hypotheses were untestable at best, such as claims that the bees were being abducted by aliens." With our pride, we always _assumed_ the aliens would _naturally_ want to abduct us!

If you don't want to read through 5 pages of article here is the relevent portion: "But one bee virus stood out, as it had never been identified in the U.S.: the Israeli acute paralysis virus, or IAPV. This pathogen was first described in 2004 by Ilan Sela of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the course of an effort to find out why bees were dying with paralytic seizures. In our initial sampling, IAPV was found in almost all though not all colonies with CCD symptoms and in only one operation that was not suffering from CCD."

The most interesting part IMO was:

One of the strains most likely arrived in colonies flown in from Australia in 2005 after the U.S. government lifted a ban on honeybee importation that had been in effect since 1922. (The almond industry lobbied to lift the ban to prevent a critical shortage of pollinators at blossom time.) The other strain probably showed up earlier and is quite different.

A completely unscientific observation is that in the Phoenix area, there seems to have been far fewer discussions about Africanized bee hives forming over the past few years.

As far as I can tell, plants are still being adequately pollinated here. I wonder if CCD affected Africanized bees in an equally strong fashion? (The article only mentions European strains of the honey bee.)

There is a large variance in reporting on the importance of honeybees. I've seen estimates as extreme as "without the bees most crops will fail," and "its not a big deal, other insects pollinate everything bees do," and everything in between.

Is this the result of sensationalist reporting or disagreement in the field?

Commercially, honeybees are essential. There are no other insects which can be so easily harnessed for huge-scale pollination. Without bees, crops would still be pollinated by other insects, but not nearly in the amount needed to sustain current levels of production (and therefore human life).

Not "human life", post-WWII American human life.

(Current levels of) human life.

See: Global-warming discussion. ;-)

Interesting the IAPV was the first proposed reason I heard of - two years ago I think. Seems like the initial thought was the right one.

"research has shown that sterilizing old beehive frames with gamma rays before reusing them cuts down the risk of colony collapse"

Where would a beekeeper gain access to a gamma source?

I talked to a bee keeper the other day about CCD. Apparently, they have facilities that you can bring the hive to that will take care of killing the colony. They then use gamma rays to "clean" the hive. I didn't ask where these locations were. I assumed they must have been associated with the nearby university.

They could use bleach. It's just research showing that sterilizing the frame helps, you don't have to use actual gamma rays.

Maybe at the beekeeper's store? (I don't know, just guessing).

Yep. Why not?

Or someone will go into business as a door-to-door gamma irradiation service: The truck with the lead-lined box arrives at the appointed time, you hand them the frames along with $x per frame, they irradiate them for you and hand them back.

If it's more efficient to truck the frames to the source... well, that works too. A lot of these industrial beekeepers routinely truck entire flatbeds full of hundreds and hundreds of beehives to farms around the country. Occasional stops at the cities where the hive irradiators are available might not be such a big deal.

But doesn't this introduce this risk of a nerdy teenager being stung by one of these irradiated bees and manifesting all the traits of a bee, except magnified to human scale?

Hospitals, lacking some industrial use I'm unaware of.

Identifying the cause of CCD is far from identifying the solution.

There are things that can't be solved even if you know the cause, but the majority of the time identifying the cause solves the problem.

Worth reading for me just for the brief remark that vaccines cannot be developed for invertebrates -- that was interesting.

I don't understand why your remark was downrated, though; I had the same thought. Seems like a messy diagnosis that will not necessarily have a quick solution.

I don't have a lot of time this afternoon -- if anyone else does, would you kindly post a succinct explanation of the real reason why the honeybees were disappearing, where they were disappearing to, and how the problem being prevented? I'd appreciate it. :)

Mostly it seems to be a virus, called IAPV, which attacks colonies weakened by poor nutrition, stress, and (possibly) pesticides. But it's actually much more complicated than that, you'd have to RTFA...

"beekeepers have had some success at preventing colony loss by redoubling their efforts at improving their colonies' diets, keeping infections and parasites such as varroa and nosema in check, and practicing good hygiene"

... uh no shit.

It's quite pathetic that we've come so far that BEEKEEPERS don't KEEP their BEES.

Between things like this and the financial catastrophe I have very little trust for money. What a shitty measure of success.

It is not so much money itself, as money combined with hyperbolic discounting -- some money now is much better than a lot more money later. Sometimes this is a valid decision; if you are going to starve tomorrow, a couple of dollars today is likely far more valuable than twenty thousand dollars next year. After that point, it is a matter of degrees; how much short-term constriction of lifestyle would you be willing to accept for the sake of longer-term reward, or how much long-term pain would you be willing to tolerate for a short-term lifestyle boost? A number of biases and beliefs come into play at this point including: whether you think yourself, or any of us, will be around for the long-term; whether you think that creating a prosperous image for yourself in the short-term will increase your long-term prosperity by playing other peoples' biases about image; whether you think you can gain enough in a short enough time-frame by taking shortcuts and being destructive than the ramifications of your actions will manifest after you get rich, and will manifest in low enough severity that get to stay rich.

The commonality between this and the financial catastrophe is that these people doubled-down on the short-term. In the financial world, they played hot potato with ticking financial "assets". In the bee-keeping world, they deferred basic hive maintenance as long as was possible and still have bees to keep. Some people get rich, some people -- sometimes a lot -- get hosed, and there is a lot of collateral damage. You might argue it is an unethical as all hell, but ethics doesn't enter into it. I get the feeling these people were going to be unethical however we measured productivity; give them a metric and they'll game it for their own ends.

bravo. the misunderstanding of economic latency combined with our natural hyperbolic discounting seems to lead to the majority of misunderstandings about economics (besides the basic fallacies and terminology).

It seems that everyone has been infected with short-term thinking and forgotten how to run a regular business. In short-term thinking you don't care about whether or not you're going to do business with anyone again, because you're unsure whether they will be around to do business with. This kind of reasoning is infectious. What we wound up with was a "race to the bottom" in terms of who could make the riskiest highest leverage moves.

It's a natural consequence of uncertainty about the future. The idea that everything could change within a few years or a decade is now so prevalent that it affects everyone's medium-term planning, and heavily reinforces the future discount.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499109

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