ccd strains of bee's

[russbee]

does anyone know if ccd is causing damage to any one individual strain of honeybee more than the other?

[Jim Fischer]

No, the strain of bee and even the producer of the queens
has been looked at with care - no pattern has appeared.

In fact, the "common factors" that one would expect to find
simply don't exist for CCD. They've gone back several times
to question the victims of CCD, and found nothing that could
be called a "common factor".

David Hackenberg begs to disagree with this assesment, and
has been circulating this document (http://beeculture.com/content/ColonyCollapseDisorderPDFs/4%20Letter%20From%20Pollinator%20Dave%20Hackenberg %20to%20his%20Growers%20about%20CCD.pdf) for over a month.

He thinks that there is a common factor in the list of crops
where bees were placed prior to CCD appearing. He blames
systemic insecticides for causing CCD.

I don't agree with Mr. Hackenberg, simply because I've seen
Imidaclopid kills before, and the symptoms of CCD are very
different from both "high dose" and "light dose" scenarios.

I have a different list (http://beeculture.com/content/ColonyCollapseDisorderPDFs/6%20Tracking%20A%20Serial%20Killer%20-%20Jim%20Fischer.pdf) of "key evidence", some which conflicts
with other pieces of evidence.

Bottom line, we STILL just don't know what causes
the problem, and even the statements made by the research
teams working on the problem are pure speculation, without
any support better than vague indications.

[Aspera]

I think that there has been a tendency of migratory beekeepers and even hobbiests to call every colony lost "CCD". Maybe this is confusing things a bit. What are the current diagnostic criteria? Last time I heard of something like this, it was "swine mystery disease" which later turned out to be a non-lethal virus combined with questionable record keeping, breeding and husbandry practices. Interestingly, once clean facilities/pathogen free pigs were established, many of the issues with poor ventilation, nutrition etc seemed unimportant.

[MichaelW]

Excellent article Mr. Fischer

as is Mr. Hackenburg's letter of caution