Walter "Wally" Thurman

And how prevalent was this in the winters of 2006 and 2007?

Well, I think if you go back and look at surveys of beekeepers, what you can say is that an overwinter mortality rate of about 15%, that would have been the norm prior to 2006 and 2007, doubled to an overwinter mortality rate of 30%.

Well, my colleagues, Randy Rucker and Mike Burgett and I were studying other aspects of the bee industry at the time.

And we heard about colony collapse disorder and thought, oh, my goodness.

This is catastrophic.

We should see increases in the prices of pollination services, in the prices of honey, reduction in bee colonies.

And when we started to look at the data and disentangle effects from trends,

There's no effect.

What do you mean by no effect?

The U.S.

Department of Agriculture takes a survey every year of how many bees there are in the United States, how many bee colonies.

Now, this is not an easy number to estimate.

Bees move around.

How do you count them?

When do you count them?

But there are censuses.

Well, just a few years after 2006, there were more bee colonies in the United States than there were prior to colony collapse disorder.

So while it was true that overwinter mortality rates doubled due to this CCD effect, the measured number of bee colonies didn't change a bit and, in fact, increased a little bit.

Yeah, it does.

And a couple of reasons.