eKos: Bee Colony Collapse Mystery Clues Revealed

by FishOutofWater

An unlikely hybrid team of researchers - military security experts, interested in using bees to detect explosives, working with university of Montana entomologists - have uncovered clues to the mysterious colony collapse disorder that has wiped out 40% of U.S. honeybee colonies. When the university researchers' hives were hit by colony collapse, they were able to gather molecular clues from the dead bees. A disease caused by a combination of a fungus and a virus appears to have killed the bees.

Dead bees were found to have a combination of viral and fungal proteins at much higher than normal levels.

continued at Daily Kos....

The Great Bee Swarm of 2010

by Emmet

 On Sunday afternoon two weeks ago I drove home from a meeting and turned into the driveway.  Then I stopped the car.  Something was up.

 Ahead of the car, right next to the house, where the neighbor's trees overhang the driveway and make a tunnel, there was a swirling cloud of little tiny dots, like a demonstration of Brownian motion -- particles in liquid.  But this was air, not liquid, and even from 30 feet away I could hear buzzing.

 I rolled up the windows and drove forward, very, very slowly.  When I was right in the middle of the cloud, I could see they were bees.  That made it unlikely that someone had decided to dispose of a dismembered corpse in OUR trash cans.  In that case it would've been flies and wasps.  

continued at Daily Kos....