A certain Mr. Doug Yanega, who appears to maintain
a bug collection for a "museum" at UC Riverside,
seems to have some highly unusual and entertaining
opinions about CCD, and he is not at all shy about
accusing beekeepers of being solely responsible for
creating CCD themselves with nothing more than
miticide misuse and abuse and, in his words,
"careless or incompetent beekeeping".
http://tinyurl.com/5c5ce3
or
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2823/why-are-the-bees-disappearing
For the self-proclaimed "#1 authority on disappearing bees",
(yes, he actually claims this in the web page I cite above!)
presumably because he has enough time on his hands to
have elbowed more knowledgeable people aside and become
an "editor" for the Wikipedia page on CCD, he sure needs
some help from us. E-mail him at [log in to unmask] and send
him some slightly more up-to-date info on CCD than what
he has read in the mainstream layman's press and on the
internets. Explain to him that CCD spreads between hives
just like a disease spreads, and has been known to do so
for quite some time.
Doug seems oblivious to the obvious plausibility
problem inherent in accusing a wide range of
divergent operations of misusing what would have
to be the same chemical(s) in exactly the same
manner, and seeing the same very strange results,
all at different times and in different places.
He is so completely unaware of the on-the-ground
reality, that he even thinks that the problem has
"gone away":
"In short, what's happened is pretty much what
I expected would happen: the CCD threat got blown
out of proportion; lots of people came up with
wild conjectures to explain it, none of which
panned out; the dramatic phenomenon didn't repeat
itself; and now people only dimly recall what all
the fuss was about. I very much get the feeling
that what many of us were saying about careless
or incompetent beekeeping - i.e., that hive
management skills had a lot to do with which
beekeepers were affected - was right on the
money, and the reason that the die-offs weren't
as severe this year, and that the research has
not been altogether revealing, is because all
those incompetent beekeepers either (a) are out
of business or (b) wised up when they realized
that people were now paying attention to their
iffy practices."
This sort of fringe viewpoint combined with the
hubris of claiming armchair expertise in an
area where he has contributed nothing at all
is an illustration of the basic problem with
the internet as a valid information source.
While it is fitting that those with no life
at all and lots of free time on their hands
are the ones motivated enough to create
extensive resources for the use of the rest
of us who do have lives, the net quality of
the information is far out-of-date, and no
better than the worst of what appears in
"the press".
Doug seems to still be unaware that the spread of
CCD symptoms has been seen by multiple credentialed
witnesses as it moved from colony to colony within
larger apiaries, and he is utterly uninformed about
Jerry B's work with hives that collapsed before
Jerry's very watchful eyes, including one colony in
an observation hive. Jerry, who did much pioneering
work in measuring environmental contaminants with
bees, is not about to misuse miticides, and cannot
easily be accused of "incompetent beekeeping".
I'd go into more detail, but Doug admits to being
the party responsible for the complete mess that
is the Wikipedia page on CCD, so all I need say
about his claims is:
[Citation Needed]
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