Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Researchers Hold International Conference on Colony Collapse Disorder

[buzz] [general talking]
Half a dozen conference attendees are using the last bit of their lunch break to check out the bees in the flowerbeds outside the Nittany Lion Inn.

A lot of honey bees here right now and a lot of large carpenter bees….But there are some small ones in there too. There are some megacylids, there’s two different species of leaf cutter, I’ve seen. (:12)

Ed Spevak is from St. Louis. Crystal Watrous from Utah.
Researchers from Washington DC, Canada and England round out the group of bee-watchers. They’ve all come to State College for the first ever International Conference on Pollinator Biology, Health and Policy. Stuart Roberts is checking out the bees in a bed of purple flowers.

The only thing that’s significantly different here is that we don’t have carpenter bees in UK. The things that look like queen bees in here are actually carpenter bees. Here’s one just down here. A gigantic great big thing. (:14)

Roberts is the bee gawker from England. He’s from the University of Reading, just south of London. He’s been invited to the conference to talk about what Europeans are doing, which includes getting the general public involved in research.

We have a very longstanding tradition of public involvement in natural history data gathering and that hasn’t really gotten off the ground here in such a big way. (:07)

Roberts says he’ll take back to England information about the conservation of wild bees.

[buzzing, fade out] [conference room talking up]

Lunchtime is over and inside Penn State University Park entomologist Diana Cox-Foster takes the podium.

What I’d like to tell you about are these viruses that are present in bees. [[ These are the RNA viruses. There have been more than 18 different viruses described in honey bees. And more are being added to the known viruses. (:16)

She clicks through a PowerPoint presentation to a drawing of a honeybee, with its internal organs mapped out. She’s talking bee diseases, like sacbrood virus, deformed wing virus…

We also have these other viruses, black queen cell virus, Kashmir bee virus, acute bee paralysis virus, Israeli acute bee paralysis virus has been detected here in the US,[[[ and we have some findings of chronic bee paralysis virus. But only in a few colonies in the US. It’s not like we find researchers reporting in Europe. (:24)]]]

Cox-Foster studies what impact these viruses have on bees. Recently, she tried to recreate colony collapse disorder. She put a colony of bees in a greenhouse, then gave some of the bees a disease to see what they would do. The infected bees left the colony and died out near the walls of the greenhouse.

Recent studies…succumbing out there. (:17)

Cox-Foster says she and other researchers are pretty sure Colony Collapse Disorder has more causes than just disease.

We think there’s gotta be additional stressors. And what’s coming out, especially at this meeting here thus far, is that probably key stressors are pesticides. That the bees are encountering many more pesticides than we ever imagined. (:14)

Farmers use the pesticides to protect their crops; homeowners to keep their yards weed and pest free. And the bees who come looking for food find a lot of pesticides as well.

Cox-Foster says another problem is that there’s less food available for the bees than there was in the past.

In large scale agriculture and also in our own gardens and roadside areas we’ve gotten rid of a lot of the weedy plants which are the flowers that provide the essential nectar and pollen for these bees. (:15)

Research released earlier this year by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the USDA found the United States lost a third of its honeybee colonies this past winter.

Cox-Foster says we should all be concerned. She says one out of every three bites of food we take is thanks to a bee or other pollinator.

One of our experts, May barenbaum…scurvey because no vitamin C.

Attendees at the conference certainly understand how serious the problem is. Cox-Foster hopes this gathering leaves them better prepared to collaborate and figure out just what’s causing Colony Collapse Disorder. I’m Emily Reddy, WPSU.

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