Talk:Colony collapse disorder

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 3 April 2019 and 7 June 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Itsphuong (article contribs). Peer reviewers: SnarkieGoblin.

Could someone correct the hyperlink of the 4th citation?

This one guides to right article.

http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2007/08/29/les-abeilles-malades-de-l-homme_948835_3244.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.186.136.203 (talk) 18:55, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Fixed. DferDaisy (talk) 00:36, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

Clunky careless writing

I cut the following long-standing pesticides paragraph -- maybe someone can salvage a bit of it. Too many semicolons and parentheses, speculations w/o citations, and nectar / honey confusion:

Pesticides used on bee forage are far more likely to enter the colony by the pollen stores rather than  nectar (because pollen is carried externally on the bees, while nectar is carried internally, and may kill the bee if too toxic), though not all potentially lethal chemicals, either natural or man-made, affect the adult bees; many primarily affect the brood, but brood die-off does not appear to be happening in CCD. Most significantly, brood are not fed honey, and adult bees consume relatively little pollen; accordingly, the pattern in CCD suggests, if contaminants or toxins from the environment 'are' responsible, it is most likely to be via the honey, as the adults are dying (or leaving), not the brood (though possibly effects of contaminated pollen consumed by juveniles may only show after they have developed into adults).

--GeeBee60 (talk) 16:52, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

The text of this paragraph has pretty certainly "morphed" over time with editorial modifications. On the whole, I agree that the overall content would require a reference to support it, as it sounds like it might involve WP:NOR. Most of the individual points are common knowledge or easily-supported observations that might not each individually require citation: (1) pollen IS carried externally by foragers, and nectar IS carried internally. This would not require citation. (2) If nectar contains strong toxins that affect adults, it CAN result in forager death. This should be easily supported. (3) Some substances that can contaminate nectar are not lethal to foragers but WOULD be lethal to brood. This should also be easily supported. (4) Brood are NOT fed nectar or honey, they are fed pollen. Non-foraging adult bees consume honey, but almost no pollen. Both points are also common knowledge. The conclusion drawn here is, from what I can see, logical, and follows from the stated points: since brood isn't dying in CCD, then if CCD is being caused by environmental contaminants, those contaminants are probably not in the pollen. The selective death of adult bees is, similarly, logically consistent with contaminated nectar/honey. The problem is that conclusion DOES need to have a citation. Dyanega (talk) 18:04, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

@Dyanega: Thanks. While honey begins as nectar, nectar is significantly more dilute, when carried it is held in a special crop that is distinct from the bee's stomach, and the fresh nectar has not yet been altered by honey enzymes. Certainly nectar can contain toxins, but honey is different enough that it is erroneous to equal the carrying of nectar with the eating of honey. I also challenge the statement that brood is not fed nectar at all; other bee species are typically fed a pollen-nectar mash and like other bee larvae, honey bee larvae require fluids. We've all seen honey bees sipping water, but do they only transfer plain water to the larvae? All this is enough to ask that these overreaching conclusions need citations. --GeeBee60 (talk) 19:34, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

I'm a bee biologist and pollination ecologist, so I can confirm these points. Foragers transfer the nectar to other non-foraging bees when they return to the hive, and then leave again. Bees that are not foraging produce, and feed on, honey. The pollen carried by foragers is slightly moistened with nectar so it can hold together in a mass during transport, but the amount of nectar is essentially negligible. Most of the water in the larval diet comes from the pollen itself and from royal jelly, a secretion which is fed to all larvae (despite the popular misconception that it is only fed to queen larvae). It is actually extremely rare for any bee species to ever offer liquid food to their brood. If honey bee larvae were "like other bee larvae" then they would feed on pollen exclusively, like 99% of all bee larvae. As such, the royal jelly fed to honey bee larvae is above and beyond anything seen in any other bee genus, and offers more than enough water. Dyanega (talk) 20:08, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for your perspective Dyanega. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but when you thow out random numbers like ""99% of all bee larvae", your science veers off the mark.

With few exceptions, bee larvae eat pollen mixed with nectar or floral oil, or glandular secretions of adults that eat pollen and nectar. (Charles Michener, The Bees of the World, 2007, pg 60)

Michener doesn't give a number and neither will I, but significantly more than 1% of bee species use nectar as part or much of the liquid in the provisions. The main reason very few bees "ever offer liquid food to their brood" is because most species don't tend brood, living only a few weeks as reproductive adults and leaving unattended eggs with larval provisions in cells tucked into stems or crevices or (most commonly) excavated chambers in the soil. A number of these bees species provision their larvae with a wet nectar-rich food, including many Hylaeus and Colletes (both family Colletidae); Hylaeus don't even have a mechanism to carry pollen except by swallowing, where it mixes with nectar in a dedicated crop.

Look, my goal in posting the paragraph that I cut is to maybe get the ball rolling on a big edit that tidies some of the random choppiness and trims some of the naively hopeful uncited claims. Cutting an old poorly written paragraph seemed like a place to start. I may have been wrong and the bigger goal is probably an impossible task, as every special interest wants to edit some pet enthusiam extolling THE one true cause. I'm glad you have credentials, as do I. Hopefully we can work together and not spend too much time peeing in corners. --GeeBee60 (talk) 13:17, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Climate Change

I severely cut down the climate change section. It was rife with misuse of sources to state things not in source material, and full of information about climate impact on other, unrelated bee species (like bumblebees, and native solitary bee species). Those issues are surely important, but not important to colony collapse disorder of domesticated honey bees. Gigs (talk) 20:40, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Working on spoken version

I am working on a spoken version of this article. Current plan is for the recording to be in four sections. Part one containing the introduction, contents, and Section 1, part two containing sections 2-4, part three containing section 5, and part four containing sections 6-8. Kayla Liz (talk) 01:36, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Glyphosate

I posted a new section "Herbicide" under Possible Causes the other day. Here was my text:

As a herbicide glyphosate blocks a pathway used by plants and microbes, and doesn't target animals directly. However, animals also depend on symbiosis with certain beneficial bacteria. The Guardian [1] wrote that Roundup "damages the beneficial bacteria in the guts of honeybees and makes them more prone to deadly infections." They linked to the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2018, "Glyphosate perturbs the gut microbiota of honey bees": "The honey bee gut microbiota is dominated by eight bacterial species that promote weight gain and reduce pathogen susceptibility... We demonstrated that the ... microbiota species are decreased in bees exposed to glyphosate at concentrations documented in the environment. Glyphosate exposure of young workers increased mortality of bees subsequently exposed to the opportunistic pathogen Serratia marcescens."

This has now been deleted by Dyanega saying that the article from PNAS doesn't mention the words "Colony Collapse Disorder." But the article is about bees dying. Is there some other Wikipedia article about bees dying that you are suggesting this belongs at? Why would the article have to use specifically the CCD term? The article is very precise in stating its conclusions: that glyphosate increases the mortality of bees. It's not the job of these researchers necessarily to generalize that.

You say, "the authors do not link glyphosate exposure to CCD anywhere. There are other WP articles about honey bee health where the glyphosate data are pertinent."

I don't see a lot of articles about honey bee health. There is another discussion of CCD here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide_toxicity_to_bees . "All substances listed are insecticides, except for 2,4-D, which is an herbicide" -

This seems like a suitable article. Can we post the glyphosate - bee death reference here? JPLeonard (talk) 05:10, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Did you read the discussions on talk:glyphosate about this paper? If not then please do as it is equally applicable here. Pieces of primary research like this need to be treated carefully and there are very good reasons why we don't use news articles as secondary sources. We need to wait until other scientists have critically evaluated the research. SmartSE (talk) 09:48, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes I have been over there. They are posting research funded by Monsanto and forbidding any reference to the fact that it's funded by Monsanto.

So WP wants first a critical review by other scientists but they will decide which other scientists count. WP admins are the arbiters over science.

You don't think articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are already peer reviewed?

You want to delete articles from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences because they are primary research or secondary research? Or maybe they are both primary and secondary according to some kind of amazing WP logic?

Primary evidence would be me posting that the bees have disappeared in our neighborhood after several neighbors sprayed weed killer, which is how I got onto this topic, with a post "Roundup Kills Bees, No Fruit on my Trees" on Nextdoor.com. Of course I didn't try to post that on WP since it's primary experience and not any controlled experiment. But that is my motivation for posting here. I'm not being paid by anybody.

WP have this lovely rule about assuming good faith, which of course is useful to maintain harmonious discussion. On the other hand it's not difficult to see how corruption could be a problem in some topics on WP. If you have an open source system where anybody can edit ANONYMOUSLY and at zero cost (with no expertise needed other than knowing how to apply WP policies), and the articles about multimillion dollar products have a very high value to producers -- is it not inevitable that there will be editorial damage control activities by corporate publicity budgets to protect their bottom line at very little expense? The return on investment is going to be enormous. Corporate public relations departments could be seen internally as remiss in their duties to shareholders if they did not attempt to influence their image on Wikipedia. One ought to expect it as rational profit-maximizing behavior.

WP has lots of rules and policies. What controls are in place to protect the objectivity of articles against corrupt practices? Can someone direct me to that discussion and that policy? -- JPLeonard (talk) 16:54, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Dyanega, you deleted my post by saying that the article from PNAS doesn't say anything about "Colony Collapse Disorder." Take another look. Under the section "Significance" in the PNAS article, the very first sentence says, "Increased mortality of honey bee colonies has been attributed to several factors." "Mortality of honey bee colonies" is essentially just another way of saying "Colony Collapse". CCD is being given as the significance and purpose of the research. So why would one shunt it over to some (non existent) generic article on bee health?-- JPLeonard (talk) 19:00, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

I would strongly suggest that you take a little time and read this article, especially - and most significantly - the section Colony_collapse_disorder#Signs_and_symptoms. CCD has an actual formal definition, including symptomology, and papers that talk about bee mortality IN GENERAL need to demonstrate explicit relevance to the article about CCD, such as the authors of a paper discussing how their data relate to CCD. Colony decline and CCD are not synonyms. What you are suggesting is what WP policy calls "original research", where you personally decided that honeybee death and CCD are synonyms, but WP policy prohibits editors from drawing their own conclusions and using that as a basis for edits. I don't think you would be surprised if you posted a paper discussing the causes of lung cancer in the WP article on ovarian cancer, and had the citation removed; this is no different. As for places that the glyphosate data might be relevant, try Bees and toxic chemicals. Dyanega (talk) 21:06, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Peer Reviews for Genetic and physio-pathological predictions

I thought this part was well written and had some interesting facts that contribute to the understanding of CCD. Maybe you could add more details about how they studied the poly(A)-RNA in the gut from the literature you cited. What are poly(A)-rRNA? Are they present in lower amounts in normal bees or not at all? I just think that the RNA part is interesting and I would like to learn more about their role in CCD. I would also define or explain what the "Malpighian tubule iridescence" is for a reader who is not familiar with the parts of the bee. SnarkieGoblin (talk) 21:17, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

I have added links to define a few jargons in this section including the Malpighian tubule iridescence, rRNA, and poly(A) tail which you suggested in your comment. Regarding how poly(A)-RNA was studied, protocol only listed dissection, RNA extraction, microarray analysis, qPCR, and statistical test. As suggested, I added qPCR and its link. For your suggestion about whether these transcripts are present in lower amounts in normal bees or not at all, the article states that due to bee samples being collected in different areas (West vs. East coasts), geography might introduce bias/ variation to the expression. However, they were able to conclude that the expressions of these 65 transcripts were either upregulated or downregulated depending on genes when comparing to the healthy bee's.Itsphuong (talk) 22:13, 30 May 2019 (UTC)