We're working up our observations of CCD over a full year. The symptoms may change somewhat with season. For example, a CCD colony in the fall or winter, when the queen has shut down or only producing a small amount of brood looks very different from a CCD colony in mid-summer when the queen is laying as fast as she can. In the first case, you get depopulated colonies; in the latter you get what appears to be slow growing colonies. Excess of brood occurs during seasons when queen was laying right up to the time of collapse. This symptom is not necessarily true in an area with limited forage and the queen more or less shut down for the season. If the colony has throttled back on brood in anticipation of winter, and the colony then collapses, you may not see an excess of brood. The absence of dead/dying bees, the lack of robbing, the lack of invasion by pests seem to be more consistent symptoms. Again, we've seen some variation -- CCD colonies in mid-summer will be robbed, but you've got to trigger the robbing. We've had some of our own colonies collapse with CCD, recover, then collapse again during mid-summer, fall, and early winter. Symptoms change a bit with season relative to egg-laying/brood rearing status and time of collapse. In all cases, the collapse is a loss of older bees. Finally, many of the most recent collapsed colonies from which we obtained samples had N. ceranae. Jerry **************************************Check out AOL's list of 2007's hottest products. (http://money.aol.com/special/hot-products-2007?NCID=aoltop00030000000001) ****************************************************** * Full guidelines for BEE-L posting are at: * * http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm * ******************************************************