Colony Collapse Disorder

[kandrathe]

I've been catching up on another big problem in the world today, that of the disappearing honey bee. It seems that over the past year, tens of millions of bees have mysteriously vanished from their hives, amounting to a loss of 50 to 90 percent of U.S. colonies. This is resulting in significant loss of yields in most crops, affecting both domestic and wild food production. So for the fundamentals of farming its a bad time for energy, and fertilizer prices to be soaring while pollination is at an all time low.

It seems that some good science has probably caught up with the answer, Israeli acute paralysis virus. This rules out the guesses from the non-science fear mongers who've suggested genetically modified crops, pesticides, parasites, stress, cell phones, and even divine intervention in the form of a bee rapture. This is probably another problem of the world being a smaller place where microbes can transit the world in a day.

Read more at MIT Technology Review, Is a Virus Behind the Bee Plague?.