http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=10832939An Auckland beekeeper who has set up 300 hives around the region says his insects have started dying at an alarming rate.
He believes a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), which has wiped out bees and reduced food crops around the world, may have reached New Zealand.
Usual caveats apply about how the press like to hype up a story about bees dying.
What worries me is that queens (and some packages as well) are still being imported from NZ into the UK.
I don't know if any have been imported to Ireland but they are certainly all over Scotland and England as the Coop project caused controversy last year when it decided to use imported NZ Carniolans on some of its farm sites in England.
A big deal is made of the stringent health checks on imports - but if we are dealing with an unknown pathogen,virus or whatever (and noone yet knows what causes CCD) how can veterinary health checks screen for that?
We should have been able to keep the UK and Ireland varroa free but importing bees from elsewhere brought that curse to our beekeeping.
Surely time to tighten up on imports or stop them altogether.
The problem is that once a new pathogen arrives you can't turn back the clock with the benefit of hindsight.
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