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There is a devastating Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) bee disease that surprisingly, humans have helped to spread among the friends of the insect world. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Exeter have discovered that the European honeybee Apis mellifera causes the illness.

Due to human transport and sales of bees for crop pollination, the disease is rapidly proliferating, reports Tech Times.

"People didn't on purpose do this. People don't go to the trouble of sending bee queens to the States for stupid reasons. They do it to get better hives or honey, to get more pollination. Until recently we didn't understand how common it is to spread diseases that way," said Lena Wilfren, a lecturer at the University of Exeter and the lead author of the study.

Although the human intention was not to spread the illness, Wilfren adds that "somewhere we have messed up the ecology. We need to be careful with this stuff. The more complex the systems are, the more unpredictable."

It is not the DWV disease alone that decimates the honeybees, but a Varroa mite is an important carrier too. As it lives off the bee larvae, it affects them by Varroa and then gets hit with DWV, which makes the bees die. The Varroa-DWV combination has caused the deaths of millions of honeybee populations in the past few decades.

It is mandatory, then, to have tighter controls on importing bees, improve health screenings before transporting them across borders. Unaffected areas can be used as a refuge and conservation for honeybees, according to HNGN.

The study was published in the Feb. 5 issue of the journal Science.