Jerry's detailed description of the degree to which CCD hives' stores are 'repellant' to robbing by other bees, as well as pests like SHB and wax moth is by far the best I have yet read and I thank him for that.
CCD is not a phenomenon experienced in Western Australia, so trying to understand how it differs from collapses caused by other problems has been a challenge for me I must confess, after reading the to and fro of opinion and arguments that have appeared here on Bee-L. Now I do understand that key difference.
It brings to mind an observation of my own, that in the scheme of things is small, perhaps insignificant, but then perhaps not.
In the normal management of my 96 hive production apiaries, I will encounter a hive that is depopulated, usually as the result of failure to establish a supercedure queen to replace a queen lost for whatever reason, or persistance by the colony to continue loyalty to a drone laying queen. Normally, if I do not detect the problem in time, (nobody is perfect, especially me,) the colony will have its stores of honey robbed very quickly, and the wax moths will move in to take over the pollen stores simultaneously.
But not always.
Sometimes the hive will just sit there empty of bees but with lots of stores, depite the presence of the other 95 hives in the apiary. The interesting thing however, is the problem I sometimes experience in recolonising these dead-out hives. My normal practice is to transfer a 6-frame nucleus colony into the hive retaining the best combs suited to its establishment, especially pollen stores. Only sufficient honey stores for the colony's foreseeable needs are retained and the balance go off for extraction. Unfortunately this sometimes does not succeed, and the next visit reveals again a beeless hive, sometimes with remnant brood, but again with unrobbed stores and no wax moth despite ideal conditions for their propagation. I have never thought too much about this, and usually put the non survival of the introduced colony down to its inability to cope with the very strong competitive pressure within the production apiary, perhaps combined with non-ideal environmental conditions. It can sometimes take up to 3 nucleus introductions to reestablish these colonies!
On occasions, in desperation, I have 'assigned' the causal effect to possibly pesticide contaminated pollen stores (my hives are used for orchard pollination in the spring), and have removed all the pollen stores when recolonising for the nth time! This usually does the trick, but I have no way of knowing if pesticide contamination was the problem, nor can I explain why other hives in the same apiary weren't similarly affected.
Obviously this is not CCD, since it does not spread as wave of infection throughout the apiary, but absence of robbing and difficulty of recolonising sound ominously similar symptoms. Do others experience anything similar?
PeterD
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