In the early 2000s, scientists began to record steep declines in the bee populations of North America and Europe. Worker bees were disappearing from colonies in alarming numbers, leaving behind the queens and the larvae. Populations have been in a steady annual decline of nearly 20% since the 1990s - some regions have seen losses as high as 90%. Apiarists call this 'colony collapse disorder,' or CCD.

This is having a grave impact on the agricultural industry. Honey bees are used to pollinate crops - not just flowers but fruits, vegetables, nuts and herbs. A large percentage of Pennsylvania's crop varieties rely on bees for pollination.

CCD was addressed in September by the Pennsylvania Pollinator Protection Plan (P4) - a program that addresses the issue of declining pollinator populations and provides suggestions for bolstering the bee population.

Smart Talk discuss the causes for CCD, the impact on state agriculture and proposals to bring back the bee population with Karen Roccasecca, Pennsylvania's State Apiarist and Royal Draper of Draper's Super Bee Apiaries in Millerton.

Also, the detection of a neutron star collision was announced last week; the gravitational waves produced by the event were recorded by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. LIGO is a pair hyper-sensitive laser arrays used to detect the gravitational waves first proposed by Albert Einstein as a product of his Theory of General Relativity.

In 2015, it first detected the collision of two black holes 2 billion light years away. Since then, there have been five other recordings of gravitational waves. These observations allow us to study the origins of the universe in a manner never recorded before and bring us closer to the elusive proof of Einstein's theory.

On Friday, Smart Talk discusses the LIGO discoveries with Dr. Chad Hanna, Assistant Professor of Physics, Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State's Eberly College of Science. Hanna is a "gravitational-wave astrophysicist who focuses on detecting gravitational waves emitted by compact binary neutron stars or black holes" who uses LIGO data to detect gravitational waves.