Honey & Espresso will make your day.
Science shows that people sleep better when they eat honey before bedtime.
Treatment for IAPV
Headlines on Colony Collapse Disorder dominated the news last year and it seems that everyone has heard of it. I am still getting a constant stream of people asking about the bee deaths. One of the more common reasons that people think is the cause of CCD is cell phone towers and I am still doing my best to dissuade people from this view.
CCD is probably caused by a number of different factors. The most probable cause is the varroa mite and the viruses that it carries. One virus that has been associated with CCD is the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. A correlation was found between the presence of IAPV and the occurence of CCD. However, later analysis of frozen bee samples has shown that IAPV has been present in North America for more than 25 years.
The Israeli-US company Beeologics is now developing a treatment for IAPV. Using gene silencing, a method of interfering with gene expression using RNA interference. The treatment, Remebee, has been tested on 100 hives in Florida and Beeologics has applied to the FDA for approval for widespread use.
While the treatment is interesting, I suspect that there are numerous problems that will still need to be ironed out. RNA is notoriously unstable and degrades rapidly. I foresee significant problems in proper application of the treatment without significant degradation making the treatment useless. Furthermore, large scale production of RNAi for use in the amounts necessary to treat the number of hives in North America will be a significant engineering accomplishment, however the use in bees will require significantly less purity than would be required for human use.
Another significant problem is that it is by no means certain that CCD is caused by IAPV. IAPV may be part of the problem, but probably other factors are involved. Beeologics is attempting to address this problem by developing further RNAi treatments that work against other bee viruses. This may eventually lead to a broad-spectrum treatment that would treat a number of different viruses. It would also be possible to target other bee diseases such as Chalkbrood, Nosema and American Foulbrood using RNAi. Even varroa, itself would be susceptible to RNAi treatment although it would require a substantial sequencing effort of the varroa genome to find suitable targets.
