CHICO, Calif. — The Bee Informed Partnership is in the midst of its annual survey of winter honeybee colony losses. It’s really two surveys: the winter loss survey, which takes about 10 minutes to complete, and the management survey, which takes about 20 minutes.

Both surveys are open only from March 30 through April 20. The project is supported by the USDA and run by extension personnel. It’s hoped that beekeepers will complete both surveys, but the shorter one can be completed alone.

According to the Bee Informed website, bee die-offs for the past four years have been “unsustainably high, threatening the livelihoods of not only the beekeepers who manage bees, but those who rely on bees for pollination.” The Bee Informed Partnership is in its second year and is an effort to build a larger, more comprehensive database regarding winter bee losses, as well as their pests and diseases.

This is according to Mike Andree, a technician from Penn State University who’s currently based in northern California. Through the partnership, Andree, along with two other technicians, is trying to help bee breeders in northern California make better management decisions.

“They’re building a database that’s serving as a repository for different surveys that have been done over the years,” Andree said of the partnership.

The partnership website also contains practical tips for beekeepers. To complete one or both surveys, go to http://beeinformed.org and click on the yellow survey button on the upper right-hand corner of the webpage.

In a related development Eric Mussen, an extension apiculturist at the University of California-Davis, spoke last month at the 51st annual meeting of the International Society of Toxicology and ToxExpo, in San Francisco. The subject was pesticides and colony collapse disorder (CCD), the phenomenon where most of the bees leave the hive, never to return.

When this happens the bees are presumed dead, but so far there is no consensus as to why the bees disappear. One line of thinking blames pesticides for CCD. Scientists theorize that perhaps the substances, which have been found in hives, disorient the bees. But in a presentation at the conference Mussen said, “not so fast.”

“There’s a whole list of things that are making it stressful for bees,” he explained, in a separate interview. “If you can get rid of two or three of those things, maybe it will make it better for the bees. But what two or three things?

“We can’t really explain (CCD). We’d love to be able to explain the mechanism. We can’t just say, let’s get rid of this or that pesticide. It’s way more complicated than that. You’re finding colonies dying off that are not exposed to those pesticides,” he said.

He added there are about 22 named viruses that affect honeybees. One or more of those could be a key to CCD.

Mussen said a total of 131 chemicals have been found in bee colonies, but not all in any one colony. “If the bees are living in that kind of stew, what is that doing to them?” he asked.

He said that the public isn’t getting the whole story about bee die-offs. Before tracheal mites, varroa mites and CCD, beekeepers typically lost 5-10 percent of their bees each year. After varroa and tracheal mites spread to the United States in the 1980s, that figure rose to 15-20 percent.

“What’s not in those statistics is that 25 percent of beekeepers in the United States are losing 40 to 100 percent of their bees. Only about 7 percent of beekeepers are saying they’re losing their bees to CCD,” Mussen said.