This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher and Tagyatta.

Springtime is flower season, and that includes some 90 million almond trees in California. It's the largest pollination event in the US

and beekeepers they truck in two-thirds of the nation's captive honey bees to do the job.

But for the last decade or so, the keepers have complained

about failing colonies with underdeveloped bees ejected from the hives. Now a

study identifies one possible culprit, not a pesticide, but one of the many ingredients used alongside them.

So these are added into a formulation to enhance the efficacy of the active ingredients.

Julia Fine, an entomologist at Penn State.

It's just called other ingredients,

and they often are the bulk of the formulated product.

The chemical in question is known as an organosilicon surfactant.

Fine and her colleagues fed the chemical to honeybee larvae over time and exposed them to a cocktail of common beehive viruses.

And they found that larvae exposed to the chemical and the viruses together appeared to die in greater numbers than did bees exposed to the viruses or the chemical alone.

So there's a possible synergistic effect at play.

And the symptoms they saw, they mirrored the ones that beekeepers observed in their hives.

The studies in the journal Scientific Reports.

Fine in their team still have to determine how much of these chemicals actually make it

into the bee's food. But they do know hundreds of

thousands of pounds of them are used in almond orchards every year and elsewhere too.

Agriculture is just one use for guinocilicone surfactants. It's all over the place so if we can

find that it has any effect in an organism it will be relevant.

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