Repeated attempts to conflate CCD with prior widespread bee disease events (i.e. "disappearing disease") all fail due to the lack of specific symptoms found in cases of CCD.

The specific symptoms were clear enough to be used when gathering samples from both affected colonies and unaffected (or, "as yet unaffected") colonies.

In California, large operations with tens of thousands of colonies commented on how they could watch the disease progress from one end of a valley to the other, again using the same set of acute symptoms to differentiate.

More recent attempts to edit or "spin" the facts so well-documented at the time are puzzling, as they always end by speaking about varroa, which also has distinct symptoms when it gets out of hand, and those symptoms, all the way to a dead-out have zero overlap with the canonical list of CCD symptoms. Ditto for infections and infestations of all types. 

I'm not sure what the purpose of such attempts are, but I can assure all that everyone who gathered in Beltsville's USDA campus to compare notes were not hallucinating when they agreed upon specific criteria for the sampling.  I listened, I took notes, and anyone who had laid eyes on affected colonies saw similar, and very unique symptoms.  I was not the only witness to this who is a Bee-L subscriber, Jerry B. was there, too.

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