Opinion Article
Jacob Z Dalgaard
Abstract
In old days, miners would bring canaries with them in the mines as a way of detecting dangerous levels of gas, due to birds being hyper-sensitivity to low oxygen levels. Similarly, male honeybees (drones) are likely to be hypersensitive to some types of DNA damaging agents, due to their cells being haploid. Potentially, such hyper-sensitivity, combined with the queen bee’s mating behavior, could explain the general decrease in the world’s honeybee populations as well as the enigmatic Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder.