Colony Collapse

For some reason, honeybees are vanishing from their hives at an alarming rate. One beekeeper lost 2,000 of his 3,000 hives in the spring of 2007, and the problem has spread to many states in the U.S. The problem is called Colony Collapse Disorder and, right now, no one knows what is happening.

Bee Lines In scientific terms, bees are in the insect superfamily Apodiea. This superfamily includes lots of families, subfamilies, tribes and approximately 20,000 bee species.

Once a hive is afflicted with Colony Collapse Disorder, nearly all of the worker bees fly off and die in the field. The queen and a handful of workers are left behind. Except for the lack of worker bees, the hive looks fine. There are no dead bees lying around, there is plenty of honey and pollen in the hive, and there is plenty of brood (baby bees in different stages of development). But without workers to maintain the hive and feed the babies, the queen and the baby bees cannot survive. The hive collapses.

So why, all of a sudden, is this happening? No one is sure. One theory is that some new kind of disease is to blame. Or, it might be something like AIDS in human beings, where a collapse of the human immune system leaves a person unprotected from a host of diseases. It might also be that a new bee fungus has appeared. One of the very strange things about CCD hives is that other bees leave them alone. In a normal situation, bees from other hives will fly in and rob all of the honey out of a weak hive. In CCD hives, that does not immediately happen.

Photo courtesy: Don Farrall/Digital Vision/Getty

As you can see, Colony Collapse Disorder is a complete mystery right now. It is a mystery that could, potentially, have a multi-billion dollar affect on many different crops if we don't figure it out soon.