Bee Crisis

I've heard a couple stories about this recently:

What is killing the honeybee?

BELTSVILLE, Md. (AP) — Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation’s honeybees could have a devastating effect on America’s dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees don’t just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

I remember reading a science blog post a while back (can't find the link) in which a study about the effects of a certain pesticide on bees found that bees grown in the lab without a certain parasite showed no ill effects from the pesticide, but wild bees infected with a harmless parasite started to die when exposed to the pesticide. This finding was discovered accidentally when some wild bees were used instead of the lab bees.

The world is a complex place and the interactions between species of all sizes are often only partially known, sometimes until it is too late. I hope the bee colonies survive this dying off or that investigators determine the cause and fix it, but part of me worries it is only the tail end of an effect building in the environment for too long already.