February 11th, 2008
“We are just beginning to see colonies collapse and die here, so we do think that indeed the virus is having an affect. … What’s different about this experiment,” she explains, “is we are actually working with isolates from the U.S. IAPV” as opposed to earlier research done in Israel, when the virus was given to a small number of individual bees.
“We’re giving it to the entire colony,” Cox-Foster adds. “We’ve also been looking at how these different viruses in the U.S. are related to one another. And we do now know that some of the strains, not all, are identical to that found in Australian bees. … We DO think there’s another lineage (of IAPV) here in the US that came in before we started importing bees from Australia.”
And that, to her, is reason enough to call for the controversial temporary ban on Aussie bees. She and at least three dozen lawmakers have requested a ban, but vanEngelsvorp says, that’s a matter of global trade restriction. And politics.
“I think that rather than a ban, what we really need in this country is a national survey, because we don’t know what the (existing American) pathogens and parasites are. Then we’ll know what we do have here and what the risks are,” he adds. “With the packages from Australia, generally they have this virus. So we know there is a close association. They have the marker, and that’s Cox-Foster’s cause and she’s doing great work. But what all this highlights is we need a way of assessing the risks of imported bee packages, and we don’t have that. So whether we should be importing Australian bees is a side issue. It would be awful if this became sort of a battle between us and them.”
Besides, van Engelsvorp says, “the only way, by international trade law, that you can restrict trade is by assessing health, and the only way to assess health is to do a national survey.” Again, it all boils down to money, he says.
Others in the field are looking at this year’s CCD numbers. So far in 2008, the syndrome appears to be affecting about the same percentage of colonies as it did in the 2006 and 2007. Reports from the beeyards vary.
“I’d say probably 30 percent of the people we talk to have experienced unusual levels of mortality,” says Texan Danny Weaver, also a commercial beekeeper with mobile apiaries. “Among those 30 percent, many have lost almost all of their colonies. I think that for whatever reason, many of our (Central Texas) customers haven’t been as affected as some of the other beekeepers. …In Washington, Oregon and California, I hear from people out there that they’re finding hundreds of thousands of dead. So, based upon what I’m hearing, it’s going to be as severe as last year in terms of the total number of colonies dying.”
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