Joe Waggle writes:

"For the purpose of illustrating my answer:
I’ll call the “CCD Colonies”,  which I think are:  
‘absconding / dwindling colonies’" 


Whether you are a believer in CCD or not, the scale of collapses that are 
being or have been reported have to be at least noteworthy if not 
alarming.  If this were an ordinary thing that beekeepers should expect, I 
doubt there would be so many people trying against all odds to make a 
living at beekeeping.  

Calling it absconding or dwindling really doesn't address the issue, does 
it?  Colonies abscond for a reason and they dwindle for a reason.  If a 
small percentage of them abscond or dwindle you can brush it off as par for 
the course, but when you loose an unusually large percentage of your hives 
you tend to think that it is, well, unusual.  You tend to want an 
explanation; a root cause.  I think we can agree that every case of 
dwindling or absconding probably does not have the same root cause.  And a 
careful observer, which experienced beekeepers tend to be, may note some 
slight or even significant differences in symptoms between one large scale 
die off and another.  If a bunch of very experienced beekeepers suffer 
unusually large losses and agree that these losses show a common 
combination of symptoms that they believe they have not seen before, it is 
reasonable and useful for them to give the situation a special name; in 
this case CCD.  
   Whether CCD is new or something that has happened before is really 
beside the point.  It is new in the sense that it is here and now.  The 
real point is that it is devastating and whether it has one cause or many 
we want to know what is causing these unusually large scale losses.

Steve Noble
      

****************************************************
* General Information About BEE-L is available at: *
* http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/default.htm   *
****************************************************