Last winter a third of US honeybees died. Should we be worried?

In the past six years, 10 million hives, worth $2bn, have been wiped out in the US. Last winter alone, a third of all US honeybees died. Should we be worried? John Hearne reports

IN her 2010 book, The Beekeeper’s Lament, American journalist Hannah Nordhaus describes the first instance of what has since become known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. It was December 2006. A Pennsylvanian beekeeper named Dave Hackenberg was tending bees overwintering in Florida.

“Hackenberg went to move 400 hives he had left on a gravel lot south of Tampa, and found 360 of them oddly empty. Full of honey, yes, and wax and honeycomb and brood-bees in various stages of development from egg to nearly imperceptible worm to white bee-like mass to baby bee.