Honeybee decline linked to deadly virus

This has been a perlexing issue for quite some time; glad they finally got it figured out. Now on to a treatment?

Honeybee virus: Varroa mite spreads lethal disease
By Victoria Gill BBC Nature
7 June 2012

A team studying honeybees in Hawaii found that the Varroa mite helped spread a particularly nasty strain of a disease called deformed wing virus.

The mites act as tiny incubators of one deadly form of the disease, and inject it directly into the bees' blood.

This has led to "one of the most widely-distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet".

The findings are reported in the journal Science .

Science 8 June 2012:
Vol. 336 no. 6086 pp. 1304-1306
DOI: 10.1126/science.1220941

Global Honey Bee Viral Landscape Altered by a Parasitic Mite

Stephen J. Martin, Andrea C. Highfield, Laura Brettell, Ethel M. Villalobos, Giles E. Budge, Michelle Powell, Scott Nikaido, Declan C. Schroeder,

The arrival of the parasitic Varroa mite into the Hawaiian honey bee population allowed us to investigate changes in the prevalence, load, and strain diversity of honey bee viruses. The mite increased the prevalence of a single viral species, deformed wing virus (DWV), from ~10 to 100% within honey bee populations, which was accompanied by a millionfold increase in viral titer and a massive reduction in DWV diversity, leading to the predominance of a single DWV strain. Therefore, the global spread of Varroa has selected DWV variants that have emerged to allow it to become one of the most widely distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet.