http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A131848

MAY 9, 2007
David Tarpy
Crisis for honeybees—and our food

BY FIONA MORGAN


David Tarpy
N.C. State University entomology professor David Tarpy has studied honeybees for 14 years. He's 
seen bees die off due to mites, pesticides and a wide array of problems—but he's never seen 
anything like today's crisis. Tarpy is part of a national working group of scientists and federal 
officials investigating the causes of colony collapse disorder, or CCD, an affliction causing more 
than a quarter of the country's bee population to become disoriented, fail to return to their hives 
and die.

Reporters Querstion: What's the scope of this problem?

Dr. Tarpy's response: "The problem appears to be nationwide, in over half of the states. About 20 
to 30 percent of the colonies that died this past winter seem to have been afflicted by what 
appears to be a CCD symptom."

Ok so we have the often quoted statistic of 25% of national hives, from Jerry Hayes and Apiary 
Inspectors of America,  which perished from fall of 06-spring 07.  

from LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-
bees26apr26,1,367041.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

"About a quarter of the estimated 2.4 million commercial colonies across the United States have 
been lost since fall", said Jerry Hayes of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer 
Services in Gainesville

To me this statistic has always been a big question mark because when its cited we never have any 
context of where they are coming from. Does it include winter kill? 

Then we have Dr. Tarpy saying 25% of the dead from winter is due to CCD. Mind you both of these 
gentlemen are part of the CCD working group.

If both are claiming the same actual numbers of hives then there would have to be another 75%  
presumably winter kill according to Tarpy.  So no that does not seem right......we'd have all 2.4 
million dead then. Ok how about going with the Hayes numbers as including winter kill too with a 
total of 600,000 hives empty. Then apply Tarpys 25% and geez we only have 150,000 to CCD. 

I guess it comes down to no one knows for sure how many....its getting obvious we're just making 
the numbers up as we go along and ask two different CCD working members and we might hear 
two very different estimates. Ask a reporter and its thousands of bees, or no wait its wiping out 
the bees, or maybe its a lot, yeah thats its a lot of bees missing yes and its real bad yes sir all 
across the world now. 

The CNN report of Brazil, Europe and Canada still lives on in other reporters reports of reports. 
Funny thing is I have seen Canadian and EU officials stating there is no CCD in their respective 
countries. Is that all it takes is one half baked report of CCD somewhere and hundreds of android 
news reporters all over the world regurgitate the latest CCD reports? For me this has been a lesson 
in how broken our world news reporting has become. There is very little actual reporting done. 
NYT stands out and occasionally a local reporter digs up some real factoids, the rest is one big 
rumor mill. Imagine how the rest of the so called news is misrepresented. Scary really the way 
people will accept it as fact and form opinions or make desicions based on this crap. 

It may go down as the biggest mystery of all...the actual number of hives affected by CCD ? No 
one may ever know.....

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