"Everybody is seeing [bee] losses this winter," said Dave Hackenberg, of Lewisburg, Pa. "This was probably the worst year ever." Hackenberg said he and other major commercial beekeepers have seen "50 percent or better" losses since late fall and in the winter, when bees typically are clustered in a warm and fuzzy ball within the hive. "We started seeing losses in late October, early November -- and they just kept going through the middle of January," he said.

Eighty percent of his afflicted hives showed signs of CCD, Hackenberg said. With the condition, foraging worker bees don't return to a hive even if a full brood is waiting to hatch. One theory is that the foragers, knowing they are sick, fly off to die rather than compromise the hive. "Something is going wrong here," said Hackenberg.

Zac Browning, a major beekeeper who lives in Blackfoot, Idaho, prides himself on the care his employees give his 18,000 hives, which includes sheltering them indoors in winter. Through an expensive, labor-intensive regimen of feeding and medication, Browning has kept his hive losses down to around 10 percent even since 2006. But when he shipped colonies to the almond fields of California this winter, one-third of the hives were found to be exterminated, most of them empty of foragers. "We had to reduce our obligations and cut contracts," he said. 

Source: Washington Post

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