This is a follow-up to a sun article that ran on Sept. 8, entitled, “The Mysterious Collapse of the American Honeybee.” It’s based on a story reported in the NY Times.

Each year for the past four years, 20 to 40 percent of US honeybee colonies simply disappeared – a phenomenon that became known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). In a major breakthrough, Army scientists in Maryland and bee entomologists in Montana jointly discovered a perfect correlation between diseased colonies and the presence of a virus and the fungus, Nosema ceranae.

Neither agent is single-handedly lethal but they are both common in cool, damp environments, and they both act on the bees’ gut, possibly undermining their nutrition.

Prof. Jerry Bromenshenk, biology, heads a “Bee Alert” team at the University of Montana and Montana State University. The team had previously worked with the military to use honeybees in detecting land mines. Recently, Bromenshenk made use of the Army’s protein analysis software to build off of research from the University of California, San Francisco that had established the fungus as a factor contributing to colony collapse disorder.

The software used by scientists at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center was developed to test known proteins in potentially threatening biological material. The goal was to identify it as a virus or some other macroscopic life form. The partnership culminated in the discovery of a new DNA-based virus.

Virus fungal combinations are a common cause of bee death, but the procedure whereby this particular combination is attacking the honeybee and the possible influence of environmental factors (heat, cold or drought) is still unclear.

CCD research is complicated by the fact that the diseased bees disperse and die away from the colony. One of Bromenshenk’s theories is that the virus and fungus together compromise the bees’ memory and navigation capabilities. Another is, simply, insect insanity.