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| Honey bees Photo credit: Newcasle University |
If you buy into the creationist hoax of intelligent (sic) design, you must wonder why the putative designer is being so hateful at the moment. Not only do you need to explain it's apparent malevolent, genocidal mendacity in designing the Covid-19 virus to indiscriminately kill people, but we now hear that it's apparently designed another nasty little virus.
This one is a virus that is spreading quickly in the UK and which kills honey bees, often wiping out the entire hive, as though the Varroa destructor mite wasn't doing it quickly enough. It's as though this putative intelligent (sic) designer hates honey bees almost as much as it hates humans.
As the Newcastle University, UK press release explains:
Data collected from visits to over 24,000 beekeepers confirmed that while chronic bee paralysis was only recorded in Lincolnshire in 2007, a decade later it was present in 39 of 47 English and six of eight Welsh counties. The scientists also found that clusters of chronic bee paralysis, where disease cases are found close together, were becoming more frequent.
Chronic bee paralysis symptoms include abnormal trembling, an inability to fly, and the development of shiny, hairless abdomens. The disease is caused by a virus known as chronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV), and infected bees die within a week. This leads to piles of dead bees just outside honey bee hives and whole colonies are frequently lost to the disease.
The team led by Professor Giles Budge published their work open access yesterday in Nature Notes.
Abstract
Chronic bee paralysis is a well-defined viral disease of honey bees with a global distribution that until recently caused rare but severe symptomatology including colony loss. Anecdotal evidence indicates a recent increase in virus incidence in several countries, but no mention of concomitant disease. We use government honey bee health inspection records from England and Wales to test whether chronic bee paralysis is an emerging infectious disease and investigate the spatiotemporal patterns of disease. The number of chronic bee paralysis cases increased exponentially between 2007 and 2017, demonstrating chronic bee paralysis as an emergent disease. Disease is highly clustered spatially within most years, suggesting local spread, but not between years, suggesting disease burnt out with periodic reintroduction. Apiary and county level risk factors are confirmed to include scale of beekeeping operation and the history of honey bee imports. Our findings offer epidemiological insight into this damaging emerging disease.
Giles E. Budge, Nicola K. Simcock, Philippa J. Holder, Mark D. F. Shirley, Mike A. Brown, Pauline S. M. Van Weymers, David J. Evans, Steve P. Rushton.
Chronic bee paralysis as a serious emerging threat to honey bees.
Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15919-0
Copyright: ©2020 The Authors
Reprinted under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
Perhaps this is all part of creationism's intelligent (sic) designer's attack on humans since bees are considered essential for food production as well as for producing honey since many of our food crops depend on bee pollination. Bees have, of course, co-evolved along with the angiosperms which have come to depend extensively on insect pollinators such as bees. These are a few of the crops that depend on bees:
Almonds, apples, apricots, avocados, blueberries, cantaloupes, cashews, coffee, cranberries, cucumbers, eggplants, grapes, kiwis, mangoes, okra, peaches, pears, peppers, strawberries, tangerines, walnuts and watermelons.
It has been claimed that if the world lost all its bees, humans could not survive.
So, any creationist prepared to explain why it looks for all the world as though their putative intelligent (sic) designer is intentionally attacking humans with both the Covid-19 virus and this bee virus?
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