Hi Dave

> It seems to me that your theory must explain ALL the data, and this is something you conveniently ignore.

I never said and never thought that CCD is just down to bad things being done by commercial beekeepers.  Hobbysist do them too (joke!!).

Conveniently ignore things that don't fit?  I'm not like that, I *love* the things that don't fit as they are the factors that make the story clearer.  From my far-away vantage point, if forced to expose my current personal synthesis of all the opinion and fact out there:

- CCD is rather like bee collapses elsewhere in time and space, and that narrow definitions of a 'new' condition have not helped
- CCD has an element due to contagion (and that alone explains the stochastic variation in occurrence)
- the contagion may be partially down to a changing, interacting combination of pests and pathogens, or it may have common elements
- the contagion mix alone might sometimes trigger the condition, but that dramatic epidemics of it might need some help to get going
- beekeepers are only too happy to provide that help, perhaps by undertaking long journeys with many bees in confinement for days, or storing bees in sheds overwinter and bringing them into close proximity with many other bees, or by others things as yet poorly understood.  I'd have lumped beekeeper-applied pesticides in there, but recent research seems to show otherwise.

I'm not saying that is the whole answer, I'm saying that's plausible from where I'm sitting and that is my current personal synthesis (and no doubt the personal synthesis of many people reading this list).  Hopefully research will either confirm this and clarify the detail, or exclude it and lead to alternative hypotheses.

But I still think that industrial almond farming is not good for the environment!

best wishes

Gavin


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