In the summer of 2007, the news was full of yet another disaster to befall the honeybee: the so-called 'Colony Collapse Disorder' (CCD), which has decimated the North American beekeeping industry and seems also to be affecting Europe to some extent. Various enquiries into the cause of CCD are under way, with some beekeepers pointing the finger at the increasingly widespread use of GM crops, pesticides like Bayer's Imidacloprid (banned in some European countries but still used in Britain and the USA)and a general decline in overall bee health caused by the long-term stresses of being farmed on an inappropriately commercial scale. The latest explanation of CCD is that it is caused by a Nosema cerana, previously associated only with the Asian bee, Apis cerana. CCD is, in fact, nothing new and its symptoms were first described as long ago as 1915, when a particularly wet spring caused many losses in the USA.
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