Hello All,

> >Find the where abouts of the dead or relocated queens and I think you
> will be on your way to solving the CCD problem.

I personally do not believe the bees are leaving as a swarm in the cases I 
have looked at. One of the most curious was in a remote area of Florida near 
the everglades national park. Most of the hives were empty of bees and the 
bees were found about 200 feet east of the hives in the water. Kind of like 
the bees followed the wrong path home.

The bees are not found just outside the entrance nor within the normal 20 
foot drop off range. The bees are flying out a greater distance  to die in 
my opinion or maybe simply flying in the wrong direction back to the hive.

Maybe Jerry B. will give his observations.

On varroa.

 About five years ago in Florida ( I visit Florida often and monitor 
commercial interests and their problems as it seems most of our beekeeping 
problems came first out of Florida).

2004
Four  years ago things changed (as I reported then on BEE-L) and the change 
involved parasitic mite syndrome (PMS).  We started seeing hives crash in 
two weeks from PMS with rather low varroa loads.  Last year Randy Oliver 
reported to me (private conversation) that he is seeing the same situation 
in some of  his research. I think he has said so on BEE-L.

What is curious is that Dr. Shiminuki ( retired head of Beltsville Bee lab) 
and the person which named PMS always had said PMS mainly occurs when varroa 
loads are over threshold and to be expected. One large commercial Florida 
beekeeper actually at the time decided to take an early retirement because 
of the  observations. Seeing virus problems with low varroa loads gave us 
grave concerns for the future profitability of commercial beekeeping.

Samples to the U.K. for testing confirmed suspicions. Before then we were 
told that if you can control varroa then PMS would not be an issue.

2008
The PMS problem was solved by using package bees to start the operation and 
all new equipment. The mistake the bee lab made in the Hackenberg experiment 
was not to place some of the package bees on new equipment. If they had I 
believe they would have seen the main problem was the old equipment. Without 
controls on new equipment the test provides little information of value in 
my opinion. All the hives did poorly from our observations. Why would you 
design a test to test the old comb and not set up a control on new 
equipment?

  We are not sure what solved the problem but now we are not seeing PMS with 
even fairly high varroa loads. The experiment is only now into its second 
year but seems to be a solution.  We think similar results would have been 
seen in the USDA-ARS Hackenberg experiment *if* some of the package bees 
have been placed on new equipment.

bob

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