This week a promising new Ebola therapy.

We're certainly hoping that this will translate to protecting infected humans.

And could bees be hooked on pesticides?

It could be that they could potentially be addicted to these compounds.

Plus the making of the Tibetan plateau and the role of thieving rivers.

This is the nature podcast for April the 23rd, 2015. I'm Kerry Smith. And I'm Adam Levy.

First, pesticides spell double trouble for bees as Marion Turner has been finding out.

You can thank a bee for when in every three bites of food you take.

Bees and other pollinators are the buzzing backbone of our crop industry.

They're important both for crop pollination, so for fruits, nuts, coffee, things like that,

and also for wider biodiversity for maintaining wild plant species.

So they're really important.

This is bee expert Nigel Raine of the University of Guelph in Canada.

But all is not sunny in the land of the pollinators.

Rain and others have plenty of evidence that bees are in trouble. There are fewer bees and

them less widespread and this could be problematic because of the pollination services they

provide to crops and wild plows. Many things may contribute to bee declines, but several

studies have pointed the finger at a class of pesticide called near-nicotinoids.

They've been used since the 1980s to treat plants from the seed up.

Once you treat the seeds, the pesticide spreads throughout the growing plant,

including their nectar and pollen.

That means they get into what bees eat.

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