Short answerIt depends
A specific syndrome named in the United States around 2006-07: adult bees vanishing from an otherwise healthy-looking colony, leaving brood, stores and a queen with almost no dead bees present. Reports matching that description declined; the term is now widely misused for colony losses generally.
A genuine, strange and well-publicised syndrome with a memorable name, arriving at the same moment as broader concern about pollinators — after which the name was applied to the whole subject and outlived the phenomenon it was coined for.
The diagnosis had a distinctive shape, and the shape is the point. Adult workers disappeared rather than dying in or near the hive. Brood was left behind, which bees do not normally abandon. Food stores remained and were not immediately robbed by neighbouring colonies. A queen was often still present. And there were very few dead bees to examine — which is precisely what made it hard to investigate.
That last feature is why CCD generated so much alarm and so little resolution: the usual method for diagnosing a colony failure is to look at the dead bees, and in these cases there were none.
Reports of losses matching that specific description fell away over the following years, while overall colony losses did not. No single cause was ever established. Investigations pointed at combinations — pathogen loads, varroa and the viruses it carries, nutritional stress, pesticide exposure and management factors — without isolating a distinct causal agent for the syndrome.
If the subject is managed colonies dying over winter, the accurate term is colony losses, and the surveys that measure them come with a country, a year and a definition attached. If the subject is wild bee species declining, that is a different problem with different evidence and different remedies. Neither is CCD.
Widely repeated and not supported by current evidence. Listed so the correction is here rather than only the claim.
CCD named a specific syndrome — adult bees vanishing from a colony leaving brood, stores and a queen, with few dead bees present. Reports matching it declined while overall losses did not, and no single cause was established. Using the term for colony losses generally misdescribes both.
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