Talk:Colony collapse disorder

I hadn't heard that about the various epidemics. Can someone find a link? JS Leitch 15:49, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

"Science has determined the probable causes being..." doesn't sound like "pinpointed" to me, it sounds like 3 plausible guesses. Some evidence (refs) would go a long way here... ħuman 20:54, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Would this page work (or at least be a start)? Questions and Answers: Colony Collapse DisorderStilldeciding (talk) 01:54, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Looks like a good start to me, especially the part way down about "Israeli acute paralysis virus". The trouble is, to me as I complained above, our article goes from "it might be one of these six random things" to "it can't be X because we know what it is" which is blatantly incompetent. I'm thinking now (after reading the article last night) that we either need to completely rewrite this, or simply delete it. Rewrite: lead with description, and list woo-ish reasons, then report on the real research that is going on, especially the IAPV thing. Right now, it is dismissive of "alternative" reasons with no good reason to do so. I wouldn't mind an "open-ended" article that describes the problem, and lists two categories of potential reasons, with however much research has gone into them. I also noted in the article you posted that it seems like a similar problem arises every 40 years (1880s, 1920s, 1960s, 2000s...) but causes aren't known. It may be as simple as predators of the European imported species making it to the US every once in a while and forcing the bees to develop survival strategies against them. Or it may not bee. Anyway, yeah, if you want to use that ref to fix things up, run with it, since the current article sucks. ħuman 02:33, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

IAPV is news to me. I did see what I believe were some of the first Varroa mites in New England in the early 1990s. They were infesting a migratory pollinating "unit" (a two-super hive, wintered in Florida, and trucked north in the spring to pollinate fruit trees and cranberry bogs) to nobody's astonishment; the main vector of honeybee diseases is a flatbed truck with a human (not you, Human, unless you've taken a new gig) in the cab.

Nosema apis amounts to a sniffle, or so the conventional wisdom was when I was involved. Varroa is a very inefficient parasite on the European honeybee; it always kills its host. CCD colonies don't always show Varroa, though. Tracheal mites are nasty too, kind of like having cockroaches set up housekeeping in your bronchi. They have been around a lot longer than CCD, so the connection is not clear. Pesticides have been around a long time too, and are supposed to be applied by licensed certified... oh why bother, you know they get sloshed around any old way. Some sloshers get caught, most don't.

In my thoroughly ignorant opinion, it is a variety of stressors coming together in some new combination. Returns aren't in yet.

Yes, the current article is, aah, suboptimal with regard to addressing the RW mission. Kind of a low-grade woo magnet, and meh. Sprocket J Cogswell (talk) 03:32, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

management and genetic factors

It's a bastard of a job. Lifting heavy shit, getting stung all day...Bees have been bred for honey production which suppresses attributes like grooming eg clean parasites etc. This could be a vector in CCD. Poor management of bees to ie. Pushing numbers of bees per available nectar. Combine that with climate change and you fucked. I'll get refs later if I can be bothered.Skinnytony1 (talk) 00:17, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Refs would be nice. My anecdotal take on the subject of bee breeding is that beekeepers come in all shapes and sizes, from backyard hobbyists to mammoth honey producers and interstate pollinating businesses. I was a backyard hobbyist, and kept whatever swarms I could catch, taking a laissez-faire attitude towards the various races of bee living in my boxes. Their temperaments varied from docile to mildly grumpy, and there seemed to be a slight positive correlation between grumpiness and honey production.

I once spoke with a Brazilian beekeeper who claimed that crosses with the scutellata strain, the so-called Africanized bee, were more diligent about picking Varroa mites off their sisters, and came to a workable balance with the parasites. Then, as in earlier decades, there was a fair amount of buzz in the trade about Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey working to breed bees resistant to tracheal mites, which were then being blamed for "Isle of Wight disease" killing UK honeybee colonies. That's early to mid-twentieth century stuff, while Varroa came to North America in the mid to late eighties.

In my time as a state inspector, I met a few control freaks who re-queened every year, and who were proud of how many honey supers they could stack up in a season, but those guys were the exception. In the county I inspected, most of the hives belonged to hobbyists, many of whom had a similar "whatever" attitude to my own, as far as what strain of bee they kept. Sprocket J Cogswell (talk) 18:10, 9 May 2014 (UTC)