Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [82]
Until relatively recently, scabies was thought to be a disease of the poor, the unwashed, and the sexually promiscuous. This view was challenged in a rather unique manner in an article titled “Scabies Among the Well-to-Do,” published in 1936 in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association:
Scabies is a disease of herding, promiscuity and travel, of family school and vacation life. A plague of armies, tenements and slums. It may with equal force invade a pedigreed school, Camp Wawa Wawa or the baronial castle on the hill. An ever present differential consideration, wholly without social boundaries, the possible explanation of the itches of the tycoon, the socialite and the university professor equally with the mechanic’s daughter on relief.
Another mite causing major concern today is Varroa destructor, which preys on several types of bees, including honey bees (Apis) and bumble bees (Bombus). Varroa can be considered an invertebrate vampire because it feeds on hemolymph. Since the bee’s circulatory system doesn’t function in gas transport, there is no oxygen-carrying hemoglobin, and as a result hemolymph lacks the red color of vertebrate blood. It is, however, a complex liquid containing a variety of hemocytes, cells that carry out many of the same functions as their leukocyte counterparts—functions that include phagocytosis and a role in the immune response. There’s even a hemocytic version of stem cells.
Female mites enter bee nests (or hives) where they lay their eggs just before the brood chambers containing the developing bees are capped by the adult bees. The parasites feed on larval and pupal instars as well as the emerging adult bees, which are also used for transportation. As with other arthropod parasites, as Varroa destructor feeds it can transmit viral and bacterial pathogens to its host.
Recently, the dramatic and nearly worldwide loss of honey bees has become a major concern not only within the beekeeping industry but also among farmers who raise the more than ninety commercial crops commonly pollinated by bees.*128 Colony collapse disorder (CCD, formerly known as fall dwindle disease) is characterized by the sudden departure of most of the adult worker bees from the hive, leaving behind the queen, a few young workers, and an abandoned brood of larvae and pupae. Although the cause of CCD is still under investigation, the list of potential suspects includes mites, bacteria, fungi, viruses, long-term exposure to substances like pesticides—especially neonicotinoids (chemicals that mimic the neurotoxic effects of the compound found in tobacco), and poor nutrition.*129 There is even a suggestion, albeit far-fetched, that cell phones are the causative agent.
In a pilot study published by the International Association of Agriculture Students, researchers at the University of Koblenz/Landau in Germany, placed cell phone handsets near four of eight beehives. They set out to measure hive-building behavior (by comparing before and after photographs of the hive chambers) as well as the tendency of the bees to return to their hives after they’d been captured, marked, and released some eight hundred meters away. Although the researchers reported that during the experiment “it became clear that both weight and area (of the hive) were developed better by non-exposed bees” statistical analysis “never showed a difference between exposed and non-exposed colonies.” Oddly, in their Results section, the authors presented only half of their bee return data. They reported that in one exposed colony, only six of twenty-five test bees returned home within forty-five minutes,