Is Influenza causing all of the Bee colony collapses?

[Pablo Escobar]

Ok, now I'm confused. I've often speculated that the wipeout of the American passenger pigeon wasn't the result of "overhunting", because it just boggles the mind that one of the most abundant birds in North America was killed for it's yummy flesh. Too much effort, too little reward.

And now, an article claimint that a strain of honey bee was also wiped out by the spanish flu?

I don't recall ever reading speculation that influenza was found in insects, however, we did speculate a lot that a lot of the strange fish kills were influenza based....

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...-80-years.html

A rare 'black' honeybee which was thought to have been wiped out by a strain of Spanish flu in 1919 has been rediscovered in the rafters of a church in Northumberland.

The rare 'British Black' is much darker than other bees, and developed in Britain after the last ice age.

The bees that populate Britain today were mostly introduced from abroad - including the popular honeybee.


The rare ‘apis mellifera mellifera’ or British Black honeybee are the only species of bee to have survived a strain of the Spanish flu which wiped out what was thought to be every single bee in the UK.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...#ixzz20Ke0Ahgt

[gsgs]

ahh, Dailymail - I think they made that up.
There is nothing meaningful about influenza and bees
at pubmed.
they never found flu in bees or indected bees in a lab

and then they should have got a _human_ virus in 1919 ?
and it did magically spread among the bees ?
and no other insects ? and nobody found it ?

> a strain of Spanish flu in 1919

how many strains were there in 1919 ?


maybe the apiculturists got sick and thus the bees couldn't survive ?

[Oric]

A virus that attacks the respiratory system kills insects that have trachea ?

[Kassy]

The passenger pigeons never even made it until the Spanish Flu:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_Pigeon

So what did kill the bees:

In Western Europe, dark bee breeds were the original honey bee stock until creation of the Buckfast bee. This is a hybrid breed whose progeny includes salvaged remnants of the British black bee, nearly extinct by then due to Acarapis woodi (acarine mite).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_dark_bee

For the trachea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acarapis_woodi

ETA and moved into discussion.

[CanadaSue]

It's just The Daily Birdcage Liner living up to its usual high standard of journalism.

[Auburn Boy]

"The Fine Art of Making Sh&T Up."

[Mama Alanna]

Originally Posted by Kassy

The passenger pigeons never even made it until the Spanish Flu:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_Pigeon

Per Wikipedia:

There was a slow decline in their numbers between about 1800 and 1870, followed by a catastrophic decline between 1870 and 1890.

And there WAS an earlier influenza pandemic in 1889-1890. It was called the Russian Flu that time.

It's not in the realm of impossibility that the passenger pigeons suffered from some sort of bird flu. HUGE flocks would have made ideal vectors for transmission.

Personally, those people who attempt to ascribe extinctions to only one factor just aren't looking at reality. Probably hunting and influenza (or some other pigeon disease) both contributed to the birds' demise.

[Pablo Escobar]

Well, I haven't done a lot of research on insects and influenza, but a quick look at the literature shows a lot of recent research on growing influenza virus in insect cells, so may not be too far fetched......

As for the passenger pigeon connection, I simply point to the well documented 100%, 24 hour, lethality of chicken flocks subjected to H5N1. And the fact that the H5N1 virus has been circulating in the wild now for at least 16 years without making the jump to humans. Who's to say that it isn't plausible that a bird only version, just like H5N1 is mostly today, of the Spanish flu, was 100% lethal to passenger pigeons decades before it made the final jump to humans.

[gsgs]

hmm, 1870 was the year of the great American horseflu

[Kassy]

I simply point to the well documented 100%, 24 hour, lethality of chicken flocks subjected to H5N1.

Monoculture chicken flocks help.
Mortality is usually lower.

American horseflu:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equine_influenza

[Pablo Escobar]

True, monocultures of chickens probably helped the mortality rate, on the other hand, passenger pigeons could also have been considered a monoculture as well.

"The passenger pigeon is in a monotypic genus, which means there is only one species in that genus: Ectopistes migratorius," he said. "This bird is pretty diverged from its nearest relatives, meaning it had a unique place in the world. It represented a unique lineage that's now gone."

http://www.science20.com/news_articl...genet ic_tree

---------- Post added at 03:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:00 PM ----------

Another good exampel of a natural monoculture becoming extinct do to biological attack:

American Chestnut

[Sonny]

Bee Flu ? What Tabloid BS, just the kind of shite I go out of my way to look for.

Isn't it hard to accept how so much news is just made up nonsense ?

~

[Pablo Escobar]

I spent a little time yesterday reading the insect cell/ influenza research, and didn't see anything that would imply bee flu possible, much less probable.