Researchers have identified a virus that may be at least partially to blame for the dramatic disappearances of some honeybees in the United States recently. In a linkurl:study;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1146498 published online today in Science, scientists report that they've found Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) in many of the US bee colonies that have been suffering from linkurl:colony collapse disorder;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/17bees.html?ex=1189224000&en=45a7b76e454cb9ad&ei=5070 (CCD) and a virtual absence of the virus in healthy colonies. A research team from Pennsylvania State and Columbia Universities and elsewhere used the latest whiz-bang high throughput pyrosequencing techniques to identify a gaggle of fungi, parasites, bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms inhabiting honeybees. They found IAPV, which had not previously been detected in the US, in all of the samples from colonies afflicted with CCD and in only one healthy colony. IAPV was first reported in Israel in 2004, and caused paralysis and the eventual death of bees there. Though these...
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