Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan __Jerry Bromenshenk threads __a tiny microphone through the front of a standard wooden-box beehive. The mic is flexible and about as thick as spaghetti, so it can be inserted without disturbing the honeybees. Not that there are many bees left to disturb. Bromenshenk, an entomologist at the University of Montana, has decided to wire this hive because he believes it's in the early stages of "colony collapse disorder," a syndrome that has caused the deaths of billions of bees nationwide — and baffled scientists.
Colony collapse disorder is bad news for anyone who eats. Typically, almost a third of an American's diet comes from fruits and vegetables, which require pollination, and no technology gets the job done as effectively as Apis mellifera, the humble honeybee. Wild bee populations in the US have declined steadily over the past half century, and today most of the remaining 2.4 million colonies are domesticated. To pollinate their crops, farmers rely almost completely on the latter — and now these hives are endangered, too.
Working honeybees live short, tough lives. Many beekeepers haul their hives from farm to farm — blueberries in Maine, alfalfa in South Dakota, apples in New York, almonds in California — from spring through fall. All that travel sealed up in boxes is hard on bees, and die-offs are not uncommon. There are also periodic catastrophes, like the twin invasions of parasitic mites that wiped out half of the US honeybee population in the 1980s.
Colony collapse disorder looks even more ominous. The alarm was first sounded late last year, when entire colonies started disappearing, practically overnight. There were no signs of attack on the hives, no dead bees, and very few clues. Soon, Bromenshenk and other experts were fielding phone calls from befuddled beekeepers across the country. Some had lost up to 90 percent of their bees.
Researchers have begun looking at several possible explanations: a newly evolved parasite or virus, poor nutrition, or stress-induced immune suppression. Chemicals could also be to blame. Neonicotinoids, a relatively new class of agricultural pesticides, are known to cause disorientation in insects. Their long-term effects on bees are unknown, but they could build up in the hive and, over time, reach concentrations that might impair bees' navigational abilities. The bees may leave the hive to forage and simply be unable to find their way back.
Bees have a highly developed sense of smell — at least 40 times more sensitive than humans. "Within 30 seconds of exposure to a chemical agent, a colony of bees will change the sound it produces," Bromenshenk says. And it's not simply that they get louder; all the frequencies shift and change, producing a unique sonic signature that can be used to identify the agent.
Hence the tiny microphone set up at the entrance to the threatened hive. Since 2004, Bromenshenk has worked on technology for the US Army that uses bees as sentinels to detect airborne toxins, and it occurred to him that studying colony collapse would be a perfect proof of concept. Since December, he's been crisscrossing the country, taking sound samples from affected hives for analysis back in his Montana lab. Eventually, Bromenshenk hopes to package a mic, digital recorder, and software in a handheld device that beekeepers could use to quickly assess hive health. "We think we can produce the actual working version of Dr. McCoy's medical tricorder from Star Trek," he says. "Only for bees."
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