Killer bees?

It's been a mild winter and on sunny days the bees have been out gathering pollen. Until recently it was light grey pollen from the snowdrops, but yesterday I noticed heavily laden sacks of bright orange pollen being bought into the hives. That could only mean one thing - the bees were working the crocuses.
I checked a patch I'd planted last summer and sure enough, there was a bee rummaging around inside a flower. On closer observation it appeared that the only way she could get at the pollen was to poke her head right into the middle of the stamens and give them a good shake. The result was a bee with a ridiculous bright orange head! Hardly the face of killer, you would think, but research published this week in Nature suggests otherwise. It seems diseases that infect honey bees also infect bumblebees, and transmission is from honey bee to bumblebee, not the other way around.
This is surprising. Honey bees have relatively short tongues and therefore don't usually work the same flowers as bumblebees. From time to time I have seen a bumblebee and a honey bee in the same flower, poppies for example, but just for seconds; surely not enough time to transmit an infection?
But the DNA evidence is damming; bumblebees are getting Deformed Wing Virus infections from honey bees, and this is probably contributing to bumblebee decline.
Thankfully nobody is suggesting culling the UK honey bee population, but there is now an even greater requirement of beekeepers to ensure their bees are healthy. That means controlling varroa mite, because more varroa means more Deformed Wing Virus, which means more chance of infecting wild bumble bees.
My orange-headed honey bee was too comical to be a killer bee, but the consequences of poor beekeeping on my part is no longer a laughing matter.