Colony Collapse Disorder: Is a Pair of Pathogens to Blame for Honeybee Decline?

Image Gallery Honeybees play a key role in pollinating important crops. The mysteriously declining population may have dire agricultural consequences. PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO/TOBKATRINA

Colony collapse disorder (CCD) research continues to be a controversial subject. The New York Times published an article in October, which we reference in this article, with a title suggesting that the work of Jerry Bromenshenk and his team had uncovered the definitive cause of CCD: Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery. However, upon preparing this article for publication, we discovered an article calling into question Jerry Bromenshenk’s findings (see CNN Money’s What a scientist didn’t tell the New York Times about his study on bee deaths). While Bromenshenk’s research on honeybee decline is compelling, his findings have been a matter of debate among experts. To learn more about the many possible causes of CCD, view MOTHER EARTH NEWS’ page dedicated to honeybee decline. 

Honeybee decline has been a puzzling problem for farmers and entomologists alike since 2006, when honeybees began mysteriously dying in large numbers. Scientists have been scrambling to discover the cause of what has been termed colony collapse disorder (CCD) over the last few years, but no official cause has been determined.

Theorists have blamed everything from cell phones to Roundup for the declining honeybee population, and an intriguing study published in October suggests that the culprit could be a combination of a powerful virus and lethal fungus. We caught up with Jerry Bromenshenk, a professor at the University of Montana and lead researcher on the bee study linking CCD to these pathogens.

How did you get involved in bee research? 

I am an entomologist by training, originally working with grasshoppers and the damage that grasshoppers did to the grasses of rangelands.

In the 1970s, after the Arab oil embargos, coal mines in the West were opened and coal-fired power plants constructed and brought online. There was considerable interest in the potential bioenvironmental impacts of this development on semi-arid rangelands. I was hired on a post-doctoral position to look at impacts to insects. I found around 6,000 colonies of bees near the Colstrip, Mont., power plants and decided that I had to include beneficial insects such as bees in my investigations.