Ccd

[Honey-4-All]

Kelp.

Only problem I can see with your info/theory is that the year before "ccd" was official (06) I had a yard that upon entering it (around Christmas time) had many hives with only the queen and a few bees left in each hive. Classical ccd pre-Imidocloprid from your info.... This is not to say this stuff wasn't out there in another form before. FYI this stuff was first registered for us in the US in 1994. see http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/imidacloprid.pdf

[KelpticFest]

I don't think that invalidates the experiment - no doubt the stuff was tested on a small scale before wholesale use.

[deknow]

Hi all,

I was also at this talk (doing sound) and have a video recording. Please be a bit patient, as I want to follow up with the researcher in question....but I will say that there were some serious flaws in the study, and in the researchers understanding of the technology involved. I can't comment on the study itself (as I haven't read it), but the presentation was ....let me say for the moment...."inaccurate in many ways"....more to come.

deknow (Keptic....I owe you an email...will get back to you in the next couple of days)

[Ted Kretschmann]

Yech! Looks like the Lardo area north of Bakersfield. There is nothing there but alkaline desert flats until the Almonds bloom. So you have to feed them with syrup and patties just like they are doing in the video to maintain strength do to the lack of blooms. Noyes probably got top dollar for pollination fees because those are grade A top notch colonies and what I like the most-uniform across the board in strength.

[Nick Noyes]

Madera area. We gave them all a gallon of syrup with HBH and the small ones a half pound of Nutra Bee that day. They all got another gallon of syrup and half pound of Nutra Bee a couple days later.
We feed a lot of sub and syrup in the fall to get them ready for almonds. It has been paying off well the last few years.

[KelpticFest]

I will say that there were some serious flaws in the study, and in the researchers understanding of the technology involved. deknow (Keptic....I owe you an email...will get back to you in the next couple of days)

I'd like to hear exactly what you see as flaws. Given that these are real insects out in the real outdoors, it seems that there aren't too many ways to test a suspected causative agent - but I know only what was presented in that talk. The fact that it was done in a natural environment, with only the pesticide as a deliberately manipulated variable, shows that whatever else is going on out there (and I don't disallow some sort of synergistic effects of other stuff), this Imidocloprid produces an effect that looks like CCD. This is buttressed by the fact that one control colony did in fact die out, but that was due to a demonstrably different cause and didn't look anything like either CCD or the treated hives. You'll note I didn't say that the "CCD problem is solved!" - I pointed out that they achieved a result that appears consistent with typical CCD hive failure. At least they now have one possible model to study, that doesn't seem inconsistent with past observations. And at least one of the researchers is pretty darned experienced in practical bee behavior. PS - I understand the paper is to be published in Insectology, which seems to be an Italian journal.