05/16/07 Bee CCD

Bee CCD. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. It is still a mystery&but now it has a name. Bee colonies all over U.S. and in other parts of the world are simply disappearing. Part of that disappearance is a normal process according to Eric Mussen, Cooperative Extension apiculturist at UC Davis. MUSSEN: Honey bees when they're ill, when they're dying, when they're at the end of their lives just literally fly away into the field and die. If they didn't do that then you would have a thousand bees dying in and around the hive. That's a day! And so it would take very many days and you'd be covered in a mountain of dead bees. Mussen says that there has been a lot of speculation but so far there are no common threads in the mystery of the disappearing bees. MUSSEN: So far there's been no  what you and I would call common thread. Just about everything they have been looking for, they'd find one beekeeper who had enough that that might be a problem but then they'd go look at another bee keeper and there was none of that but they had some other thing and they'd go look at a third beekeeper and there was none of the first two problems but a third problem could have been a contributor. Even though the scientists are stumped, they can at least call it something. CCD. Colony Collapse Disorder. MUSSEN: You can almost now define it, although you don't know why it's caused but you can more or less say if this is what you've found in your operation, then you've got what we're calling this&this disorder. UC Davis is rebuilding their honey bee program after a number of years without some key personnel. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.