My Experience with Colony Collapse Disorder

Mt. Lassen Summit Trail - photo by JoAnn Sturman

by Dave Young, M.D.

I am an amateur apiarist who initially entered the hobby with my daughter when she was a Girl Scout. She is presently 23, and I’ve remained a hobbyist for the last 10 years. Colony collapse disorder, or CCD, is a phenomenon in which adult honeybees are absent from the hive, leaving the hive in a functional state of collapse. Interestingly, the queen, honey, and brood (bee embryos) are often present in the hive. With no adult bees to gather pollen, nectar, tend to the brood and queen, and make comb, the hive eventually “collapses” and becomes non-functioning leading to the death of the queen, drones and brood.

In 2000 we had 4 thriving beehives that had been in production for about 4 years. I had re-queened all 4 hives (a process in which the hive’s queen is located, removed, and replaced with a younger queen) in the spring; two of the hives with Italian 3-banded queens, one hive with a Hungarian queen, and the 4th hive with a Yugoslavian queen. I use European varieties of queens because they are easier (less aggressive) to work around, but they tend to be less productive in manufacturing honey. We had a productive spring and summer with each hive yielding about 3 gallons of honey. I harvested the honey in July leaving the bees plenty of time to reestablish a honey supply for the brood and a food supply for the fall and winter. In October I noticed a reduced activity in bees entering and leaving the hives. When I opened the hives, all 4 exhibited the same findings: almost no adult honeybees, a diseased queen, low levels of brood and a good supply of honey. I consulted more experienced beekeepers in the area and many of them had observed the same findings in their hives without a good explanation.

I sterilized my hives and left them empty for the winter. I re-started the hives with new adult bees and new queens in the following spring. That summer was productive and uneventful, and the hives appeared healthy in the fall and had a successful wintering with very little bee mass loss. In the spring of 2002 the hives were healthy, had a productive summer but in the fall all 4 hives collapsed again.

Although this phenomenon is irritating to the hobbyist it represents a major impact to the overall agricultural economy. In the 1940s it was estimated that were approximately 5 million managed beehives, today the estimate is only 2.5 million. In California alone it is estimated that 1.3 million hives are needed just for the almond crop. That is over one half of all the estimated hives in the US. According to USDA statistics bee pollination is responsible for 15 billion dollars in added crop value.

The exact cause of CCD remains elusive. No common environmental agent or chemical stands out as causative. The USDA postulates high levels of stress weaken the immune system allowing the tracheal Varoa mite or the Nosema gut microbe to infect the hives. This would not explain why the queens, drones, and brood generally remain unaffected. Another theory is poor nutrition due to apiary overcrowding and over pollination of crops with low nutritional value or scarcity of nectar. Again, this would not explain the hobbyist losing a backyard hive.

An intriguing theory regarding increased cell phone use and the proliferation of microwave towers to accommodate 2G>3G>4G>5G phones is being studied.

What did I do? An elderly apiarist in my beekeeping association recommended saturating newspaper with olive oil and placing a single layer of the saturated paper between the brood box and all of the supers, or honey boxes. His theory was that as the workers traveled from level to level within the hive, the bee’s carapace becomes oily. When the bee cleans its body, the trachea becomes too slick for the Varoa tracheal mite to attach. It sounded hokey, but I tried the oily newspaper technique. I’m no longer keeping bees, but from 2004 to 2010 I had no colonies collapse.