Today's New York Times ran an article on how academia and the military, working together, were able to discover the cause of honeybee "colony collapse", which for the last few years has decimated 20 to 40 percent of the honeybee population in the U.S. It took the unique partnership of military scientists and entomologists to recognize that the collapse syndrome was the result of both a virus and fungus working in tandem. Identifying the fungus causing the problem and the conditions that it needs to grow, brings us one step closer to a positive intervention.
One of the biggest problems has been that the honeybees, when infected, leave the hive flying in all directions — and die alone — making collecting corpses for autopsies, a necessity for investigation, difficult at best.
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