International Herald Tribune Editorial - A virus among honeybees

International Herald Tribune Editorial - A virus among honeybees
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: September 12, 2007


Last week, scientists reported having found a possible cause of the collapse of honeybee populations in the Untied States reported in the past year. What is interesting isn't just the virus, called Israeli acute paralysis virus, but the use of new methods of genetic screening to determine what pathogens the bees in collapsed colonies had been exposed to. Researchers were able to quickly screen the DNA from all the organisms present in the bees and compare them with the DNA in genomic libraries, a catalog of known organisms. Bees from collapsed hives had the virus. Healthy bees did not.

Two other factors may also have played a role in this die-off. One is drought. The other - still unproved - may be the commercial trucking of bees from crop to crop for pollination, a potential source of stress. These may have made bees more vulnerable to the effects of this virus.

In some ways, this newly reported research seems all the more important given all the speculation about what has been killing off the honeybees. These hive losses have inspired a kind of myth-making or magical thinking about their possible environmental origins. The suspected culprits include genetically modified crops and cell phones, to name only two.

Causation is a rigorous concept in science. It is vastly simpler in the popular imagination. Blaming cell phones and genetically modified crops for the death of bees is a way, mainly of saying that we are worried - not only about the death of creatures both benign and beneficial to us, but also about technology's effect on our world.

Causation, in the nonscientific sense, is just a way of organizing our worries.