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Date: | Thu, 21 Jun 2007 07:28:44 -0400 |
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I appreciate Jerry's willingness to post on this List. Most researchers
would not, just because this is more an opinion forum than scientific.
So here is another hypothesis (guess).
The one characteristic that has intrigued me from the first is the
disappearance of the bees. That symptom is similar to the same symptoms
of Varroa and Tracheal, where both lead to the bees vacating the hive
and dying away for the hive.It does not matter if the bees are foragers
or nurse bees. They leave. This is very apparent here in the north with
bees clustering outside the hive in freezing winter weather when they
suffer from Tracheal. No one seems to know why they do it.
Maybe there is something hardwired into the bee that causes them to
remove themselves from the hive when they are diseased. It is not that
they die of disease away from the hive because they are foragers, but
they actively fly or crawl to remove themselves as an agent of disease.
It would seem a logical survival trait in a close clustered society
where proximity would lend itself to the spread of disease. Add the even
more closely packed colonies in a commercial operation and you compound
the problem.
What would trigger such a migration? Some have seen such migration with
Varroa spread virus where the bees will march out of the hive and die in
masses in low spots away from the colony. In any close quartered
society, epidemics and even pandemics are not uncommon. Maybe, with
bees, there is a trigger that when disease reaches a certain level,
behavior triggers the bees to move away from the hive. A pheromone could
be involved. That would also protect the remaining healthy bees from
visits from other infected colonies.
So any major assault that reaches a certain level quickly could trigger
such a response. You would then have some or all of the symptoms of CCD,
but faced with the larger question of what caused the pandemic. Since
behavior is the product of the pandemic, the agent could be anything
that can spread quickly in adult bees, which tends toward virus and some
fungal or bacterial infections. So CCD may be a behavioral
characteristic of the bee and not a single pathogen. It might be caused
by many things.
Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine
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