North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[road's end farm <organic101@linkny.com>]

On Apr 18, 2007, at 8:50 AM, Thomas Olenio wrote:
>  
> Just seems odd that the die offs of honeybees started last fall (Fall Dwindle Disease renamed Colony Collapse Disorder), and last fall we know that contaminated gluten entered the feed chain, and that glucose (sugar) is a common honeybee feed.
> [ . . . ]This just seems a very reasonable avenue to explore regarding CCD.  Eliminate the obvious.
>  

It certainly makes sense to investigate whether there's any connection between CCD and what, if anything, the bees were fed. Whether or not they were fed anything containing gluten, there may have been some trace contaminant in feed, and bees (like cats) are highly sensitive to some things. It should be possible to find out if all or most of the affected hives were fed anything that was not also fed to large numbers of unaffected hives; and, if so, then to analyze that feed. This process would take a while; there might well be people working on it, and if not, there should be.

However, glucose and gluten are not the same thing. There are a lot of words in English that sound similar, but similarity in the word does not always imply similarity in the named item. (Sometimes even the same word can have two or more significantly different meanings: for examples, "organic chemicals" and "organic farming", or the notorious "cleave", which is its own antonym. Language can be pretty confusing.)

--Rivka
Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 mostly