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qwip = new makeArray(41);
qwip[0]='The scientists report using a novel genetic technique and old-fashioned statistics to identify Israeli acute paralysis virus as the latest potential culprit in the widespread deaths of worker bees, a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.';
qwip[1]='"The neighbors call us \'The Little House on the Prairie,\'" Fortin said on a recent summer afternoon. "They think I\'m a kook."';
qwip[2]='Few people realized that the honeybee apocalypse was already over. We may continue to associate them with childhood sugar rushes and chubby-cheeked fertility metaphors, but in real life honeybees have been virtually extinct in North America for more than 10 years, their absence concealed by a rogue\'s gallery of look-alikes.';
qwip[3]='Boxer, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and her bipartisan House and Senate allies want to authorize $89 million over five years for more research and grants to help reverse the decline, which is estimated to have cut the nation\'s honeybee population by 25 percent in recent years.';
qwip[4]='Beekeeping is illegal in New York City. The law lumps honeybees together with alligators, lions and ferrets as "wild and ferocious animals." The city\'s urban beekeepers, then, form an unofficial secret society of asphalt naturalists -- romantics drawn to the beauty of a beehive\'s intelligent design, epicureans seeking the delectable taste of locally procured honey, and off-the-grid types keeping nature alive in the city.';
qwip[5]='The puzzling phenomenon, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, has been reported in 35 states, five Canadian provinces and several European countries. The die-off has cost U.S. beekeepers about $150 million in losses and an uncertain amount for farmers scrambling to find bees to pollinate their crops.';
qwip[6]='It\'s a frightening trend that, according to those hard at work at solving the problem at universities and organizations worldwide, could lead to everything from a radically transformed diet to an overall wipeout of the world\'s food supply.';
qwip[7]='While no one is certain why honey bee colonies are collapsing, factory farmed honey bees are more susceptible to stress from environmental sources than organic or feral honey bees. Most people think beekeeping is all natural but in commercial operations the bees are treated much like livestock on factory farms.';
qwip[8]='For starters, California\'s almond farmers -- who grow the most bee-intensive crop in the country -- are forecasting a record harvest this year. In fact, the latest estimate, recently released, is for this year\'s crop to be almost 20 percent bigger than last year\'s. The state\'s plum, peach and nectarine farmers say that their trees are full of fruit too. And so do cherry, pear and apple farmers in Washington.';
qwip[9]='Apparently unknown before this year, CCD is said to follow a unique pattern with several strange characteristics. Bees seem to desert their hive or forget to return home from their foraging runs. The hive population dwindles and then collapses once there are too few bees to maintain it. Typically, no dead bee carcasses lie in or around the afflicted hive, although the queen and a few attendants may remain.';
qwip[10]='It makes perfect poetic sense, don\'t you think? After all, are we not long overdue for such a fatal environmental karmic bitch-slap? Has Mother Nature not had just about enough of our arrogant invasiveness? Don\'t you already know the answer?';
qwip[11]='Honeybees don\'t just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have.<BR>Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.';
qwip[12]='"There is no proof of Einstein ever having said or written it." While Grosz notes that it is extremely difficult to disprove a quote, he "could not remember even one reference to bees in Einstein\'s writings."';
qwip[13]='As the quiet debate over the issue continues in the halls of government and university laboratories, the body count has risen with each passing day. Authorities in more than two dozen states have now verified similar cases. Disappearances have also occurred recently across Canada and Europe.';
qwip[14]='Other researchers said Wednesday that they too had found the fungus, a single-celled parasite called Nosema ceranae, in affected hives from around the country -- as well as in some hives where bees had survived. Those researchers have also found two other fungi and half a dozen viruses in the dead bees.';
qwip[15]='Committee Chairman Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) declared in a statement that the bee decline should be an important part of the current discussion of a new farm bill. "The U.S. honey industry is facing one of the most serious threats ever from colony collapse disorder," he stated. "The bee losses associated with this disorder are staggering and portend equally grave consequences for the producers of crops that rely on honeybees for pollination. These crops include many speciality crops and alfalfa, so viable honey bee colonies are critically important across our entire food and agriculture sector."';
qwip[16]='Another little known fact is that bee pollination is increasingly a highly concentrated industry. Rather than a dispersed system of local hives, a few commercial operators now haul tens of billions of bees from coast to coast, trucking their hives in 18-wheelers.<BR>';
qwip[17]='Scientists who spoke at the conference said a similar problem appeared among bee colonies in the 1960s, according to Kim Kaplan, a USDA spokeswoman. "They were never able to define a cause, and it disappeared," she said.';
qwip[18]='More than a quarter of the country\'s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost -- tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives.';
qwip[19]='"It\'s not the staples," he said. "If you can imagine eating a bowl of oatmeal every day with no fruit on it, that\'s what it would be like" without honeybee pollination.';
qwip[20]='Billions of bees have mysteriously vanished since late last year in the U.S.<BR>Disappearing bees have also been reported in Europe and Brazil<BR>One-third of the U.S. diet depends on pollination, mostly by honeybees<BR>Some beekeepers are losing 50 percent of their bees to the disorder';
qwip[21]='A team of scientist led by the National Institute of Beekeeping in Bologna, Italy, found that pollen obtained from seeds dressed with imidacloprid contains significant levels of the insesticide, and suggested that the polluted pollen was one of the main causes of honeybee colony collapse';
qwip[22]='The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees\' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.';
qwip[23]='Beekeeper James Doan first began finding empty hives last fall. Entire bee colonies seemed to have up and vanished, leaving their honey behind. Noting the unusually wet fall in Hamlin, N.Y., he blamed the weather. Unable to forage in the rain, the bees probably starved, he reasoned.';
qwip[24]='Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeping Federation, said while there have not been any formal counts, the beekeeping industry estimates about 20 percent to 25 percent of the bee colonies across the country have been affected. Fore said he\'s even heard of some beekeepers losing all of their hives. ';
qwip[25]='The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.';
qwip[26]='That there is Bt in beehives is not a question. Beekeepers spray Bt under hive lids sometimes to control the wax moth, an insect whose larval forms produce messy webs on honey. Canadian beekeepers have detected the disappearance of the wax moth in untreated hives, apparently a result of worker bees foraging in fields of transgenic canola plants.';
qwip[27]='The cogent point is that the bees in the colonies appear to have lost their immunity to viruses, bacteria and fungal diseases. The loss of resistance to disease may be caused by parasites, virus infections, or pesticides (both applied and present in GM crops).';
qwip[28]='It\'s hard to overstate the importance of this problem. The vast majority of our food crops are pollinated by insects, and quite simply without the insects there can be no harvest. Bees are among the most important pollinating insects.';
qwip[29]='First, the endotoxins currently expressed in Bt corn (Cry 1 types against caterpillars; Cry 3 types against beetles) are not active against hymenopteran insects such as the honey bee, nor do the CCD symptoms resemble those expected in Bt intoxicated organisms. Yes, the increase in bee loss has somewhat paralleled the increase in Bt crops in the U.S., but severe bee losses have occurred in Europe and in areas of Canada where Bt crops were not grown.<BR>';
qwip[30]='The bees seem to be playing the role that canary birds had in the mines, warning us of impending disaster. Are these insects, by their unprecedented behavior of flying off without returning to their hives, showing that something insidious is going on?';
qwip[31]='Late in the year 2006 and in early 2007, however, the rate of attrition was alleged to have reached new proportions, and the term "Colony Collapse Disorder" was proposed to describe this sudden rash of disappearances.';
qwip[32]='GM material has been detected in honey, and current regulations in the EU require testing of honey for GM material.  As more GM crops are adopted, testing of honey for GM material could evolve into a daunting and expensive task due to the foraging behavior of bees.  Producers of organic honey could face difficulties in marketing their honey since honey containing GM material cannot be certified as organic.';
qwip[33]='Reports of unusual colony deaths have come from at least 22 states. Some affected commercial beekeepers _ who often keep thousands of colonies _ have reported losing more than 50 percent of their bees. A colony can have roughly 20,000 bees in the winter, and up to 60,000 in the summer.';
qwip[34]='The current phenomenon, without a recognizable underlying cause, has been tentatively termed "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD), and threatens the pollination industry and production of commercial honey in the United States.';
qwip[35]='The parallel I see here between GM crops and bees reminds me of the relationship between DDT use and birds in the late 50\'s and 60s, brought to the world\'s attention in Rachel Carson\'s book.  It seems like GM use sits just below the surface of public awareness and needs a boost to get it more on the forefront of daily public thought and discussion. Perhaps it is time for "Silent Spring" part 2.';
qwip[36]='"They\'d fly off and not come back, but we never saw any dead bees. So we\'re not sure if they were flying off and apparently not capable of coming back or if they flew off and died. That\'s still a very big unknown," Mrs. Ford said.';
qwip[37]='Pollen from sunflowers and corn plants grown from seeds treated with a neonicotinoid contains enough of the chemical to pose a threat to bees, according to research cited by the Penn State research group.';
qwip[38]='Colony collapse disorder has been reported in 24 U.S. states, with bee losses of up to 90 per cent in some hives, according to a study. The U.S. agriculture department says $14.6 billion (U.S.) of pollinated crops may be threatened.';
qwip[39]=' they are calling what is potentially a pesticide or insecticide mass die-off a novel obfuscating term: \'colony collapse disorder\'. Is that like calling pesticide pollution a strange unknown "bird dieoff disorder"--without touching on the powerful and deadly pesticide and herbicide industry?';
qwip[40]='CCD is associated with unique symptoms, not seen in normal collapses associated with varroa mites and honey bee viruses or in colony deaths due to winter kill. The uniqueness of these symptoms has been recognized by members of the CCD working group';