I appreciate Jerry's willingness to post on this List. Most researchers 
would not, just because this is more an opinion forum than scientific.

So here is another hypothesis (guess).

The one characteristic that has intrigued me from the first is the 
disappearance of the bees. That symptom is similar to the same symptoms 
of Varroa and Tracheal, where both lead to the bees vacating the hive 
and dying away for the hive.It does not matter if the bees are foragers 
or nurse bees. They leave. This is very apparent here in the north with 
bees clustering outside the hive in freezing winter weather when they 
suffer from Tracheal. No one seems to know why they do it.

Maybe there is something hardwired into the bee that causes them to 
remove themselves from the hive when they are diseased. It is not that 
they die of disease away from the hive because they are foragers, but 
they actively fly or crawl  to remove themselves as an agent of disease. 
It would seem a logical survival trait in a close clustered society 
where proximity would lend itself to the spread of disease. Add the even 
more closely packed colonies in a commercial operation and you compound 
the problem.

What would trigger such a migration? Some have seen such migration with 
Varroa spread virus where the bees will march out of the hive and die in 
masses in low spots away from the colony. In any close quartered 
society, epidemics and even pandemics are not uncommon. Maybe, with 
bees, there is a trigger that when disease reaches a certain level, 
behavior triggers the bees to move away from the hive. A pheromone could 
be involved. That would also protect the remaining healthy bees from 
visits from other infected colonies.

So any major assault that reaches a certain level quickly could trigger 
such a response. You would then have some or all of the symptoms of CCD, 
but faced with the larger question of what caused the pandemic. Since 
behavior is the product of the pandemic, the agent could be anything 
that can spread quickly in adult bees, which tends toward virus and some 
fungal or bacterial infections. So CCD may be a behavioral 
characteristic of the bee and not a single pathogen. It might be caused 
by many things.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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