We have a genuine mystery on our hands. Larger-than-normal numbers of honeybees are dying off, we don’t know why, and we’re calling it Colony Collapse Disorder. I have talked about it on my show already, but I thought I would put up a few links to some good resources.

First, here’s a New York Times article that came out monday, summarizing some of the information that has been discovered about CCD by the CCD Working Group at Pennsylvania State University. One of the really cool things is that although we don’t know what is causing it, we have been able to rule out a few potential causes already. Read the CCD FAQ page for more.

What I find also interesting is how many fringe hypotheses have come up as the proposed cause, from Genetically Engineered crops to Cellular Phones, to the Rapture. The first two, the CCD working group is not investigating, because the pattern does not fit. Bill Mahar, unfortunately, is promoting the cell phone bunk, which you can watch here.

Not only was the cell phone “study” not peer reviewed, (it was a pilot study) it wasn’t even about cell phones! The authors of the german study in question have since come out and said that their data is being misused. Hilariously, while debunking the cell phone claim, they still put forward the genetic engineering claim, which is also without evidence. What do these things have in common? They are things that people fear, and want to blame for something. Wishful thinking is no substitute for science.
Here’s a great quote from the NYT article about all that:

As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all.

And here’s a paragraph with some good and some bad:

So far, the researchers have discounted the possibility that poor diet alone could be responsible for the widespread losses. They have also set aside for now the possibility that the cause could be bees feeding from a commonly used genetically modified crop, Bt corn, because the symptoms typically associated with toxins, such as blood poisoning, are not showing up in the affected bees. But researchers emphasized today that feeding supplements produced from genetically modified crops, such as high-fructose corn syrup, need to be studied.

Don’t waste your time. Besides the fact that they’ve already stated that the symptoms of Bt toxicity do not match the condition of the bees, Bt isn’t detectable in corn syrup. From a July 2005 paper on Bt corn and food products made from it:

Corn flakes, puffs, oils and syrup did not yield soluble proteins or did it at a very low level, which was not enough to detect the CryIA(b) protein.

And:

Finally, it was not possible to determine if foodstuffs like maize oil and maize syrup were derived from transgenic grains, due to these(sic) fact neither DNA nor proteins were detected in the samples.

If you can’t even detect it in the corn syrup, it’s not likely to be a factor, besides the fact that they have already ruled out corn syrup fed to the bees as a possible factor. So I don’t know why there’s a disconnect there, whether the researchers haven’t read up on it yet, or if the journalist misinterpreted what they may have said about it.
While I was reading up on CCD, I came across a new blog and added to my roll to the right. The Conspiracy Factory: “Working toward a unified conspiracy theory - to make debunking it go faster.” So far I’ve liked what I’ve read, and the author supports open-access journals, too. Give them a read!

Also, last night at a bee club meeting I was interviewed for The California Aggie newspaper on CCD, along with my friend Eli. It should be printed in Thursday’s edition, and I’ll post a link when it’s up.

Buzz.