FOUND IN TRANSLATION: Bees and the Web that Traps Them

摘要

While big injuries, exposures and accidents are always a risk, it is more often an accumulation of small insults and decay that bring down honey bee colonies. Baffled by not being able to find a singular cause for Colony Collapse Disorder, we coined ‘pathogen webs’ ten years ago to describe what was actually seen in collapsed colonies (Robert Cornman and colleagues, Pathogen Webs in Collapsing Honey Bee Colonies, 2012, PLoS One, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0043562). Troubled bees contained multitudes of microbes, but those multitudes were different from Bakersfield to Okeechobee and from Harrisburg to central Texas. We might have missed the forest for the trees, as I mused for Bee Culture in C-C-Decade, (2018, https://www. beeculture.com/found-in-translation-13/) but perhaps the multitudes would have given us better insights if we had just waited long enough.