I don't know if you have been following this story, but there have been massive honey bee die-offs recently in the United States. Considering that honey bees are the primary pollinators for many of the crops grown here, this is a problem that greatly exceeds just the bees.

Scientists have been racing to figure out what the problem is, and many theories have been suggested to explain the bee die-offs, most of them completely ridiculous. Most of the non-ridiculous ones are focused on the possibility of transmitted disease in the bees or some environmental toxin. To distinguish the two, I found this experiment in the NYTimes coverage:

The national research team also quietly began a parallel study in January, financed in part by the National Honey Board, to further determine if something pathogenic could be causing colonies to collapse.

Mr. Hackenberg, the beekeeper, agreed to take his empty bee boxes and other equipment to Food Technology Service, a company in Mulberry, Fla., that uses gamma rays to kill bacteria on medical equipment and some fruits. In early results, the irradiated bee boxes seem to have shown a return to health for colonies repopulated with Australian bees.

"This supports the idea that there is a pathogen there," Dr. Cox-Foster said. "It would be hard to explain the irradiation getting rid of a chemical." (Emphasis mine.)

That's quite clever, I think. It just goes to show you two things. 1) Science works and 2) if you want to solve a complex problem, break it into parts.

People are also testing for toxins and looking for parasites in pathological sections and by DNA screening, but that seems very much like a needle-in-a-haystack approach to me. I like this experiment better.