Comments on: To bee or not to bee

By: Viromics « ViroBlogy

Viromics « ViroBlogy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:17:17 +0000

[...] this sort of discovery, a major metagenomic project involving colony decline disorder of honeybees was described in MicrobiologyBytes recently: this involved sequencing all of the DNA and cDNA from many beehives, [...]

By: Viroblogy Archive « ViroBlogy

Viroblogy Archive « ViroBlogy — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:00:43 +0000

[...] To bee or not to bee [...]

By: Don’t look now, they’re in your genes « MicrobiologyBytes

Don’t look now, they’re in your genes « MicrobiologyBytes — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:35:38 +0000

[...] Comments Amiya Sarkar on Bacterial toxinslstanford82 on To bee or not to beeFernando Pavan (Brazil) on Video/Animations of Intracellular PathogensEd Rybicki on To bee or [...]

By: lstanford82

lstanford82 — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:48:23 +0000

I agree, still there are the bees that are not present. Where are they? What in the virus causes them to leave the hive and not come back? I think that it is a good start but there has to be something else. I agree withe the above post that it might be an issue but not the total cause. I think that there as to be more studies as they say above there is a lot of money that might be thrown out there.

By: Ed Rybicki

Ed Rybicki — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:31:00 +0000

You know, I would be a lot more convinced that IAPV was the sole cause if I didn’t know that viruses pop up in insects due to stress responses: we discovered 4 insect viruses in our labs because they suddenly appeared in crowded insect colonies (2 aphid viruses – one also a dicistrovirus causing paralysis – and 2 stinkbug viruses).

So perhaps IAPV is part of the syndrome rather than the cause…? But if you could prevent our stripy little friends getting it in the first place, maybe the cell phones and insecticides / pesticides wouldn’t be sufficient to upset them.

A lot of work waiting out there for some lucky someones.

By: lstanford82

lstanford82 — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:18:52 +0000

I like that we are looking at the problem due to the fact that Bee’s could be considered an indicator species and there could be a bigger ecological factor some where. I hope that we continue to worry about our little working friends.

By: spurius

spurius — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:38:27 +0000

This is very interesting. But we should all admit that nobody knows what is happening to the bees.

Please read these articles:

http://spurius.wordpress.com/2007/09/10/befuddled-again/

and

http://spurius.wordpress.com/2007/09/08/honey-bees-and-cell-phones-a-go-go/