Here is an example of scientists exploiting the simplistic attitudes of the media and the public. CCD is no longer a thing, maybe was never a thing, but let's exploit the public's love of a buzz word and anything apocalyptic ...

Quoted material follows

“I have not had anyone experience CCD personally,” Steve House, director of operations for California Almond Pollination Services, told me in his truck as we drove between growers a few weeks after the bloom. House was collecting hives to send north on the next stop of a journey in which they would pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the U.S.: The almond bloom marks the beginning of an annual insect migration of trucks full of beehives following the flowers from the San Joaquin Valley, up into the fruit orchards and berry farms of the Pacific Northwest, across the Plains states and their various vegetable plots, and eventually all the way to the cranberry bogs of the East Coast. “I’ve never talked to a beekeeper who has personally experienced it.”

“I don’t even use the term ‘colony collapse disorder’ anymore,” Bob Curtis, associate director of agricultural affairs at the Almond Board of California, an industry group representing growers, told me. “ ‘Colony collapse’ is just a description of a symptom.”

This was the near consensus among the farmers and bee professionals I spoke with: CCD wasn’t their utmost concern; the disorder was most likely, as much of the research has suggested, a confluence of stresses affecting bee health. Many believe we’ll never know what caused bee colonies to start dying en masse. The good news is the public is finally paying attention, and we have CCD to thank for that. 

“Rather than talk about honeybee health with the consumer or the general public, there’s this label—‘colony collapse’ is something people can latch on to and understand,” Curtis said.



“I, as a researcher, was a little naive in the beginning thinking that we would find one cause and then hopefully one solution” to CCD, said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland and the lead author of the Bee Informed Partnership’s annual honeybee loss report.

“Colony collapse disorder, by the strict definition, we don’t find it anymore,” said vanEngelsdorp. The phenomenon that was observed for the first time in 2006 has a particular look, he explained, which has lately been absent: “No dead bees in the bee yard, in the bee apiary—evidence that that collapse happened very quickly. Those very classic symptoms of CCD we haven’t seen in three or four years.”

In the same period, a lay understanding of colony collapse disorder has developed that lumps together disparate honeybee health concerns, ranging from pesticide exposure and habitat loss to the monoculture approach to farming and other perceived ills of industrial agriculture.

“That isn’t our scientific meaning of CCD—it means something else,” vanEngelsdorp said. “But it has the public’s imagination. They want to use a very broad definition of CCD just for higher colony mortality because it’s easier to say. I don’t think there’s any problem with that.”

VanEngelsdorp feels that as long as bees are dying at an unsustainable rate, whatever brings attention to the issue is a good thing. “The instances of CCD in the proper definition probably helped to highlight that these other issues are going on in the bee world, and they need to be addressed. I think it’s positive that people are concerned,” he said.

Source: http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/06/20/what-is-killing-bees

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Comment: Are bees dying at an unsustainable rate? There certainly no evidence that they are. Colony numbers in the US are gradually rising again while worldwide they are increasing rapidly. Putting it bluntly, the numbers are being sustained.

PLB

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