Tuesday, July 16, 2013

UM researchers, others close in on cause of bee collapse

The bees swarm in the morning heat, their buzz pouring from boxes stacked on Mount Sentinel. Numbering in the thousands, they’re warming up for their morning quest for pollen. These docile honeybees are players in a national mystery, helping researches at the University of Montana determine what’s killing colonies like theirs across the country. After years of work, the team of sleuths is close to isolating at least one cause of Colony Collapse Disorder and proving it with scientific certainty. “We still think it’s a pathogen – a concurring infection of at least two different organisms that cause colony collapse, and they all happen to infect the intestines of the bees,” said Colin Henderson, a project research manager at Bee Alert Technology and a professor at Missoula College. “We’ve done whole-colony experiments on this, and it works every time.”...more

No comments: