The Great Sunflower Project

Is CCD a paricitic mite or disease or something more? Well here's a thought. While we have seen honey bee's up and vanish, thats because beekeepers keep bee's. They notice the lose fairly fast. Since then others have noticed bumble bee's and other pollinators vanishing as well. Xerces Society has been following that fairly well. So, knowing a little about genitics, I know there are very few perisites and very very few diseases that cross species. So the chances that a disease is the cause of the loses in honey bees, bumble bees, butterflys, lady bugs, and more are so slim I don't think they have a calculator that has that many digits to the right of the decimal point. No, I know the chemical companies don't like to hear it, but being a former USAF guy, bio and chem was something I learned alot about, and chemicals, (read insecticides) go after everything within range. Bayer Crop Science makes a great one called imidacloprid, a systemic pesticide produced by Bayer Chemical Company. It's in most everything, from Grub-Ex to Rose Food (kills aphides). It's even used as a seed treatment, mostly on corn, sunflowers and canola, tho is on many others as well.
This is whats called a neonicotinoid is, I'm told, very safe for mammals, just toxic to insects, all of them across the board. Read Bayers web site on what this does to insects, they use termites for the example. It makes them forget to go home and they die of exposier, they forget to eat, and die of starvation, even in very small amounts, 40 parts per Billion, yes, billion with a B. Does this sound like what happens to a CCD hive? tThe adults fly off, don't come home, leaving the queen and young bee's.. Hmm..

So why not just ban imidacloprid? Because Big Chemical (due to corporate consolidation, six corporations--Syngenta, Bayer, Monsanto, DuPont, BASF, and Dow--control almost the entire global market for crop protection) is, well, big. According to Bayer's 2006 Annual Report, Bayer CropScience sales of imidacloprid pesticides topped €560 million (about $746 million). That's about 10 percent of Bayer CropScience's approximately $7.5 billion in total sales, making imidacloprid products, according to the company, the world's No. 1 best-selling pesticide.
With so much money at stake, any ban on imidacloprid would be an uphill battle. Even after France's government shut down use of the pesticide, Bayer insisted it was harmless to bees and went so far as to file a lawsuit against a French beekeeper for derogatory remarks he made in the media about Gaucho.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/04/22/honey-bee-collapse.html