There are assumptions here, that the mite collapse occurred during the 
winter and then you will have lots of dead bees. If you collapse in the 
fall, bees can fly out and die, plus bees will clean out the dead in the 
hive. So you can have CCD symptoms but the actual cause is mites for a 
winter kill. CCD is tied to fall dwindling but you can get the same from 
mites.

Tracheal will leave a "cup of corpses" and lots of honey if it kills 
most of the bees off in fall.

I have one colony that died this past winter that has a cup full of bees 
left and plenty of honey, but know it was mites and probably tracheal, 
not CCD. This was the second winter that I did not use Crisco patties, 
so I put the blame where it should be, on the bad beekeeper.

I have no problem in acknowledging that CCD exists especially since it 
has the same symptoms of past diseases for which no definitive cause has 
been found. Plus, it has appeared with a certain periodicity. I remember 
back some 10+ years ago when Andy spoke of it on this list. But it was 
just another problem beekeepers faced and it was not the end of bees and 
beekeeping. It happened and disappeared for another 10 to 15 years. That 
sounds a lot like the life cycle of some organism and not anything new. 
You could blame it on sunspots, since they have an 11 year cycle. The 
warming associated with sun activity could trigger fungal growth. It is 
easy to hypothesize.

For any scientific inquiry, it would be nice to have a good baseline 
before the disease hits, and from what I have seen and heard, that is 
questionable. We are relying on the reputation of the reporter and not 
hard facts. From my observations of some large beekeeping operations, 
the beekeepers, although large, did not possess superior knowledge and 
could not recognize problems in their own operations, or chose to ignore 
them. That will bias the data significantly.

To rely on reports is bad science when you are trying to find a 
definitive cause, but is, unfortunately, the situation that we are in.

So I still ask, how many confirmed CCD colonies have died? Add another 
question, how many of those were observed before collapse by the CCD team?

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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