Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
devastated many of my hives and, in search of a new income I moved to New Zealand.
About a year later I read about CCD in Spain and realized that I was possibly one of its
first victims - or at least one of the first to admit to it.
Causes
The cause or causes of the syndrome are not yet well understood, but many have
been proposed, including environmental change-related stresses, malnutrition, Israel
acute paralysis virus, mites, pesticides (such as neonicotinoids or imidacloprid) and
genetically modified (GM) crops with pest-control characteristics, such as transgenic
maize. The newly discovered variant of nosema (
Nosema ceranae
) has also been
postulated as a cause of the problem.
Somewhat tongue in cheek (although it is what I believe), I wrote the following in the
editorial for the February 2008 edition of
Apis UK
, the online beekeeping magazine:
The problem of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) seems to be the 'new varroa'
talk of the day in the bee and public press. I can well remember the days not so
long ago when varroa was the only thing that beekeepers talked about - and
perhaps it still should be. I have been in the beekeeping world a comparatively
short time (around 18 years) and my main interests in it have been both
the production side of things and the scientific side of beekeeping research.
I happily trawl through an awful lot of research articles for
Apis UK
for
example and I have watched over those few years as new and exotically named
syndromes have appeared on the scene - Varroasis; Parasytic Mite Syndrome;
Virus diseases of various kinds; a new variant of Nosema and now CCD, and
as I read various bits and pieces and listen to people talking on the subject,
except for the new variant of nosema, it usually all comes back to varroa. I
could be spot off here but that's what it all looks like to me.
There is also I believe the very underestimated effects of stress on bees to think
about. Many beekeepers place enormous stress on their colonies. I did. Moving
them from winter quarters to pollination where they could obtain no nectar
(kiwifruit) and feeding them copious amounts of sugar and then moving them
hurriedly from Gold fruit orchards to Green fruit and then equally hurriedly
