You can’t find a cure until you know what the symptoms are exactly, and now, finally, we do.

We’ve mentioned Jerry Bromenshenk here before. He’s involved in more projects than most and has even more on the back burner waiting for some of his time. He’s been involved with Colony Collapse Disorder from the very beginning, and has kept his nose to that grindstone ever since. He and his colleagues at the University of Montana, the U.S Army’s Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center, his own company Bee Alert Technology, and BVS, Inc. have ferreted out an amazing amount of information on this Disorder. Not yet the final answer, but they are much closer to understanding the problem than even a few weeks ago.

One windfall of all of this is that they have figured out how to examine honey bee samples for essentially every disease and problem that has been documented and do it rapidly and inexpensively. This service is just coming online for beekeepers and it will be a boon for them without question. Already this is showing beekeepers what management procedures are effective in both the short and long run, thus enabling them to make cost effective, efficient and healthy decisions regarding how they manage their bees.

Already the beekeeping community is more aware of the best management practices over time to combat the worst of the regular pests and diseases bees have, and this year, it appears so far anyway, the almond orchards should have an ample supply of bees for pollination. Of course it’s only late December and bees are fickle, fragile creatures ... and in bee time, it’s a long way to February.

These discoveries ...

Like swallows to Capistrano, or the geysers in Yellowstone, the predictability of seedless mandarin orange growers and beekeepers banging heads in December is becoming very, very predictable. It was almost exactly a year ago to the day that we first discussed this situation but here’s a short recap if you didn’t read it then and don’t want to read all of that past stuff now.

Beekeepers in California have been placing their beehives in the citrus belt part of the state forever. They stay for three to four weeks making orange blossom honey, building up, getting fat and sassy, enjoying the good life. Citrus growers benefit some from this arrangement with increased yields, but citrus trees tend to be pretty self sufficient with or with out bees, so the growers don’t mind much. And the bees and the beekeepers have been pretty happy with this arrangement. There was, as I understand it, some time ago, disagreements over pesticide applications and bees in the groves (citrus plantings are called groves, not orchards for reasons I don’t know, but if you do, fill us all in), but they have been resolved and bees pretty much go where they want, when they want.

Until recently. ...

The USDA Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) hasn't, as far as I know as of Sunday, made a decision on whether to allow Australian honey bees to continue to be sent to the U.S. or not. We reported on this issue a few days ago when it finally came to light that it was the worst kept secret in two hemispheres that a new species of honey bee had been discovered in Australia as long ago as May, 2007. That bee, Apis cerana, is otherwise known as the Asian honey bee. We have what is known as the European honey bees.

Now there's not really a problem with this bee in and of itself. They are smaller than our European honey bees, and they are pretty easy to tell apart. Except there's this trade contract we have with Australia that says that if they have it, they can't send bees to the U.S. It's that simple.

What the U.S. is really worried about is not these new bees so much as the pests and predators that come along with these new citizens of that country. What viruses, diseases and other nasties lurk within is what everybody is worried about ... well, there are some other issues. Like, what is Australia doing at all its other ports to make sure this won't happen somewhere else; what is the beekeeping industry in that area; how are the captured bees being analyzed and for what problems; and how confident, really, are the Australians that they have contained the spread of this new bee? ...