Good morning,
Whitewater’s Columbus Day forecast calls for a mostly sunny day with a high temperature of seventy-seven degrees.
In the CIty of Whitewater of tonight, there will be a Planning Commission meeting at 6:00 p.m. The meeting agenda is available online. At 6:30 p.m., there will be a meeting of the Library Board. The meeting agenda is available online.
There is a scheduled public listening session with school district administrator Suzanne Zentner at the district’s central office (419 South Elizabeth Street). The English language session is from 5:00-5:45 p.m., and the Spanish session from 5:45 to 6:30 p.m.
Photo from Jon Sullivan
There’s a study that points to a possible cause of honey bees’ decline (colony collapse disorder). The cause may be two combined afflictions:
In this new study [published in PLoS One], researchers looked at bee colonies that had died off due to CCD, or were in the process of failing, and compared them to a few that had no history of the problem. They couldn’t pin down a single pathogen as the problem—however, they could pin down two.
According to the paper, “virtually all” of the CCD colonies were infected by two things: the Nosema fungus that researchers had previously suspected, and a DNA-virus called invertebrate iridescent virus (IIV). IIV is fairly prevalent in bee colonies (75 percent of healthy ones also had it) but its combination with Nosema seemed to spell doom for the bees….
Quick notes: Ars Technica reporter Casey Johnston notes that the study’s lead researcher has a link to Bayer Crop Science, a maker of pesticides that might be used to treat CCD under the above explanation.
See, Dying bee colonies linked to a fungus and virus in cahoots.
For the original study (hardly a layman’s paper!), see Iridovirus and Microsporidian Linked to Honey Bee Colony Decline.
Life imitates art — in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), Bruce Wayne discovers that the Joker has devised a lethal assault on Gotham city’s residents, inserting different toxins into ordinary substances in a way that use of only one is harmless, but the combination of several proves fatal.