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sellers. Welcome to Science Talk, the

weekly podcast of Scientific American, posted on August 25th, 2009. I'm Steve Murski. This is the special

third part of our two-part B podcast. It was going to consist solely of an interview I had done in

July with John Williams, the beekeeper at Downhouse, Darwin's home in England.

But on August 24th, May Baronbaum, from the first two parts of this series, her student, Reed Johnson and their colleagues, published a major paper on colony collapse disorder in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So I called May Barronbaum the morning of August 25th, and we'll hear that conversation,

after which John Williams will talk about Darwin's Bees.

So one more time, here's May Barronbaum speaking from her office at the University of Illinois

in Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Barronbaum, in part one of the podcast, which was recorded actually in February,

you talked about the fact that your student, Reed Johnson, was doing the genomic analysis

of the honeybees, and that might yield some really interesting clues as to what's really going on with colony collapse.

And just fortuitously for our scheduling on August 24th, your paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Can you just talk about what new information you've gotten so far?

Well, back in February, the result of the microarray analysis, we knew that we were seeing these

essentially broken ribosomes and the bees afflicted with colony collapse disorder.

Broken ribosomes.

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