Bee Man's Worry: Colony Collapse

The keeper spotlighted in this story is the CCD posterboy who started this whole phenomenon of disappearing bees.

His credo is "its the pesticides" that have contaminated his hives. Now not to trivalize pesticides and their impact on the environment but some more background on the CCD posterboy is in order.

Seems in the spring of "06" a Penn State Bee Inspector looked at his hives and documented poor bee health with plenty of symptoms of high varrora mite infestation, viruses and bacteria caused disease common in honyebees. The same inspector came by in late summer and found the same situation and warned that his bees would not last much longer without some intervention.

Now the way the varrora mite thing works is because they are a parasite they build up in numbers as the bees do as spring turns into summer. By fall bee population starts to wind down and the hives with high parasite loads start to crash as the mites overun the remaining honeybees, and typically viruses start to manifest themselves. So most beekeepers are well aware of this fact and treat their hives with some sort of miticide (nice word for INSECTICIDE). While there are soft or organic treatments available these big keepers don't have time for that kind of monkey business, they just need the latest silver bullet sold by Bayer or Wellmark (hey wait a minute isn't Bayer the folks who brought us the bee killer pesticide in the news these days call imidacloripid?)

snippet below from

http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/ent/treefruit/html/2006TF04/2006TF04_55.php

*IMIDACLOPRID (Provado) is a broad spectrum
contact and locally systemic chloronicotinyl insec-
ticide with low mammalian toxicity. High bee-poisoning hazard, exhibiting toxicity on
contact plus repellency and hive disorientation.
Formulation available and EPA registration
number: Provado (Bayer) 1.6F: 3125-457

We don't know what posterboy put into his hives last fall but its a good bet it was not something friendly to the bees. Do a google search on coumaphous, trade name checkmite or fluvalinate trade name, apistan and see what you find. Also its useful to know that these EPA approved "strips" have not worked well since they were over used and the mites deleloped a resistance to them in the last 3-5 years. Some large beekeepers buy the concentrated version of the Apistan or use Amitraz which has not been apporoved in any form for insertion into a bee hive via a soaked shop rag delivery mechanism.

Also visiting the USDA ARS website one finds a handy article on

The damaging effects of the coumaphous strips and how the queen bees cannot survive or replicate.

http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?seq_no_115=188813

Hmm I wonder what the problem might bee?