The new bees arrive on the 21st - less than two weeks. They will have missed the enormous amount of pollen that's been around for weeks, but that can't be helped. I finished the cover for the insider hive and painted it what was meant to be a honey color. It is, kind of.

Meanwhile, recent bee news reports a Harvard study on CCD. This mystery appeared in 2005/6, right after use began of neonicotinoids on corn. This is an insecticide that is absorbed by the seed and permeates the plant for its lifetime. The study exposed bee colonies to a small dose of imadacloprid (one of the neonicotinoids) and also had control colonies which were not exposed. After 23 weeks, 15 of the 16 exposed colonies had CCD. All 5 of the control colonies were healthy. Here's a link to the article: http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0405-hance_colonycollapse_pesticides.html?utm_campaign=General+news&utm_medium=Twitter&utm_source=SNS.analytics

The really inisidious suggestion is that imadacloprid gets in the bees from high fructose corn syrup, that cheap sweetener of choice for the food industry. What does it do to us?

In colonies with CCD, the bees just disappear, as apposed to most problems where you have piles of dead bees in or around the hive. Apparently, this poison affects the bees' homing instincts so that they can't find their way back to the hive. Most testing mechanisms look for short term effects resulting in dead bees, so they wouldn't discover these results.

The results are convincing, but not conclusive. Scientists always try to reproduce results to confirm or deny the original findings. Personally, I think it is one more instance of big agriculture damaging us while thinking that they are on a noble mission to feed the world.  Grow your own and think organic.