Juanse asks:

As  robbing depend on environmental availability and insect demand, what
about  the time of the year of the dissapearement?
Robbing of CCD colonies more or less completely absent during late  fall, 
winter, early spring.  The absence of robbers and the number of days  
equipment appears to be repellant to robbers shortens a bit in the late  spring, 
summer, early fall.



What about if this robbing spread the disease and therefore  insects die and
robbing is stoped?
There is no robbing - that's the point.  No wax moth, no hive beetles,  no 
honey bees robbing or invading.



Does the disease affect other insects as  well?
No one knows, has looked.  Claims that Africanized bees are resistant  are 
speculative - I've seen no data.  One beekeeper thinks ants may be  involved.



It is hard to believe that the robbers are able to detect  the 
"contaminated"
stores. Can ants, moth, bettles or other bees "detect"  viruses?
But they may be able to detect odors released by the disease pathogen(s) or 
 sick bees.  We tried hard to find a repellant.  We found  hundreds of 
chemicals - but that was the problem, so many chemicals, couldn't  find a 
'repellant' simply because we didn't have enough time/money to test each  
chemical.  Some colleagues are trying a different tactic - testing for  chemicals 
from known pathogens for repellancy.
 
Allen states:
 
I have no idea how one can make a scientific observation on this point  
(regarding lack of robbing), and 
I have been mystified by this report from  the start.

It is the only thing that justifies flagging this as a new  phenomenon, in 
my 
opinion. 
 

Dave  Westervelt and I first reported this symptom.  In CCD beeyards in FL 
in  Dec, 2007 - we had collapsed hives, failing hives, and always a few  
better hives.  In the better hives, we had so many hive beetles, the  pollen 
supplement patties moved about from the beetles underneath.  In  the collapsed 
colonies - queen and small retinue of young bees - there were NO  hive 
beetles.  And, a with less than a 1/2 frame of bees, with two deeps  of comb 
unprotected, at that time of year, unprotected comb should have  been inundated 
by wax moths - but no wax moths.  Open the collapsed  colonies - no robbing 
by other bees.  Open the best colonies and you got  robbing.  In all cases, 
yards of 'healthy' bees were nearby, so there  were plenty of robbers - and 
day temperatures were in the 80s  F.
 
Then we went to CA in the winter/spring.  Four piles of CCD boxes in a  
beeyard, each pile the size of a load of boxes on a semi-flatbed  truck.  Tarps 
over the boxes, and boxes with 40 # or more of honey in each  - yet no 
robbing at all.  
 
In the same field, there was the yard with the heavy collapse and the piles 
 of boxes (about 80% of the colonies perished), a yard of failing colonies, 
 and a yard of very good colonies - all within 200 yards of each other 
(points of  a triangle).  Over 5,000 colonies in that field.  No robbing in the  
CCD group, little robbing in the group of colonies beginning to fail, and 
every  queenless colony in the good group was covered with robbing bees and 
stripped of  stores.
 
More than a month later, bees finally began to rob the tarped stacks of CCD 
 boxes.  
 
Similarly, our FL beekeepers reported that sitting CCD boxes out to  air - 
no bees would touch any of them for several weeks.  In TX, bee  less and 
weak bee colonies showing CCD, with lots of  remaining honey, were not robbed 
by their healthier neighbors, even when the  tops were removed, and 1 frame 
pulled up above the rest, and left to  open induce robbing.  Two weeks later, 
open hives with lots of bees  around in the yard - yet all of the honey 
still in place.  (Beekeeper  figured he'd let healthy colonies rob out the 
honey from the collapsed colonies  - but they wouldn't touch the open hives).
 
Don't need statistics for these types of response.  It seems that when  
bees begin to rob CCD hives, then you are safe to re-populate the  equipment.  
Force bees on to it, and ~50% of those colonies are likely to  fail - 
observations from several CCD operations that we checked, where the  beekeeper 
tried to restore weak CCD populations by adding packages or  splits.
 
And yes, I agree - this is the one unique symptom that I've not seen  
before.  Very odd.
 
Jerry







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