BOSTON — The honey bee is on the decline.
In some states, honey bee populations are already at an all-time low.
In others, they are declining fast.
Now, researchers say, a virus may be to blame.
The CDC says the virus has killed more than 500 million honey bees and has killed about 1.2 million of them.
The latest findings, released Wednesday, were a sobering reminder that a virus that has been around for decades and killed millions of bees could threaten not only bees but all of us.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the honey bee’s population is declining at a rate of about one-third a million every year.
But experts warn the virus is not a “crisis” that needs to be dealt with.
The honey bees that die are not just the bees that don’t survive the coronavirus outbreak.
The virus kills bees that were not vaccinated.
The disease is a “virus” that kills not only the bees but also the people who work with them, the scientists wrote in a report released Wednesday.
The researchers, led by University of Pittsburgh professor Robert Schmitz, said the honey bees have suffered from a lack of access to vaccines, poor quality food, and the virus that’s killing them.
Schmitzen says a combination of these factors could have caused the honeybee deaths, which began to occur in March.
The scientists say the virus likely emerged from the infected wild populations and has been spreading rapidly in recent years.
They’re hoping to find the culprit.
A virus has infected bees in Europe, Africa and South America.
It is a strain of coronaviruses, which includes the coronavia virus, which caused the pandemic of 1918.
There is no vaccine or cure for the virus.
So far, there are no known deaths linked to the virus, but experts say it’s possible to get sick and die from the virus if exposed to it.
Researchers say they’ve already detected traces of the virus in pollen from bees that died in the spring.
That’s a concern, because pollen carries the virus and can be used to track where the virus might be coming from.
The next step is to isolate and analyze the pollen samples.
The pollen would have to be taken from infected bees.
Then, if the samples were from the wild populations, they would be tested to see if they had been exposed to the coronava virus.
Schimetz said he has been working on a research project to identify the virus strain.
The team plans to collect and analyze more pollen samples, including pollen from infected wild colonies, to see how much of the coronavalirus there is and where it is coming from, he said.
The research team has been trying to identify coronavirosts in the wild for decades.
It’s not yet known what the virus may have been doing in the honeybees, SchmitZ said.
They also want to look at other bees in their study to see whether they have been exposed and if they have a similar virus strain to the one that killed the bees.
The study has been funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in a statement, said that it is taking “all necessary steps” to protect public health and safety.
The agency said it is “aware of the concerns raised by the media.”
“The USDA takes this situation seriously and will continue to monitor the situation closely,” the statement said.
Scientists are hoping to get the virus isolated and tested for the coronva, or coronaviral, strain.
It will take time to determine whether there are any known strains of the new virus.
The strain that has already been found is not related to any other strain of the disease.
The USDA also said that scientists in the U.K. are trying to find out whether the virus they’ve been looking for in honey bees is related to the same strain that killed bees in England last year.
A second study, conducted by a separate group, was released in October that found similar viruses in the same wild populations of honey bees in the United States.
Scientists from the University of California at Berkeley and University of Michigan also tested a new strain that had been found in honeybees from Britain, where the coronaves were found.
In those cases, the researchers say the strain appears to be different from the strain found in the UK.
Researchers also are working on figuring out if the virus could be transmitted between wild and infected populations.
Schmittz said the virus was a “super-strain” that can only be found in wild populations.
It has the ability to infect the entire population of the wild colony and then the virus can then spread through the colony, he told NBC News.
It could then be passed to other bees.
Scientists have not yet been able to isolate the virus from any honeybee.
It remains unclear how the virus spread in the past, Schmittson said.
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, he says