John Little is a regular reader who lives in Japan and shared the following fascinating data about differences between colony collapse disorder there and in the U.S.  I'll let him tell you the story in his own words.

On a different subject, bees and CCD [colony collapse disorder], I recently came across some local (Japanese) information which seems, on the face of it, to confirm the neonicotenoid connection.  At an apple growers meeting a couple of weeks back, one of the members brought along a pre-release version of a documentary on DVD called "A message from the bees".

Basically, there were two critical points which differentiate the experience of
CCD here in Japan from what is generally being seen in Europe and the U.S.  The first is
that beekeepers here are seeing different symptoms.  Instead of empty hives, they're finding piles of dead and incapacitated bees on the bottom boards and in front of the hives.  In the majority of cases, the deaths have been correlated to local spraying of neonicotenoid-based insecticides 60 days before.

The second piece of interesting information is that the spray dosage levels in Japan are
much, much higher than in most of the rest of the world.  For the common insecticides used by fruit growers, the allowable levels (in ppm) are 20 to 300 (yes, three hundred!) times those mandated in Europe or the U.S., leading researchers here to the conclusion that they have identified a "smoking gun".

As one old beekeeper from the coast of Nagasaki-ken (in southern Japan) put it, "The centre of Tokyo is now the safest place to raise bees.  The air there is cleaner than any part of the Japanese countryside".

Scary information (especially for those of us who are involved in agriculture).  And the "message" from the bees?  "You're not just killing us (bees), you're killing
yourselves, too".