I've been reading these Steiner lectures and he has a rather novel take on requeening hives--which beekeepers do to prevent swarming and the queens are artificially raised.

He says that a worker bee lives in a kind of twilight world. They don't see well and don't need to (which is true, they ID each other by smell rather than sight). They have three individual eyes between their compound eyes. These eyes are called ocelli. Actually, all members of the order of hymenoptera (bees, ants and wasps) have three ocelli. These sense light and dark.

What Steiner says though is that bees have a kind of psychic sight with these eyes. When their queens are in the sac, the workers can see them with their ocelli as a bright light. They are actually brightest in the pre-hatch phase. The reason why the queens appear this way to the other bees is that she is their sun, so to speak. That's why they follow her. The inside of a hive is pitch black but the bees can "see" because the queen illuminates their way. And they can find her in heartbeat because she is the bright and shining one. When a new queen is born, the old queen prepares to exile herself. Oddly, she could kill the new queen but somehow her evolutionary programming will not permit this because the new queen is needed to carry on governing the hive.

Entomologists have always been puzzled as to how each bee knows whether or not to will leave with the old queen or stay and serve the new one. Steiner says that older workers are most adjusted to the light of the old queen and so will leave with her. The younger bees are less adjusted and can as easily adjust to the light of a new queen and so stay behind to serve her. The new queen gives a brighter light than the old queen and so her light hurts the older bees. Her light enters their ocelli and upsets them--like someone waking you up in a dark room and shining a bright flashlight in your eyes. So the older bees cannot stay and serve the new queen because she "blinds" them--disrupts the twilight they live in and are comfortable with. Hence they leave with the old queen and swarm out to form a new hive.

Even though CCD didn't exist to any real degree in Steiner's day, what he predicted would happen with requeening was that it would produce "blind" bees. That is, they never have time to adjust to a queen's light because she is killed and replaced every year by a new artificially produced queen. The result is that they are in a constant state of blinding by new queens or the new queens being artificial give off no light at all. Either way, the worker bees do not know her and cannot live with her and so will leave the hive and her behind. This is precisely what happens in CCD.

Steiner in the early 20s stated that workers and queens are aligned to the sun while drones are aligned to the earth. Queens fly towards the sun during mating season and drones pursue her. It is true that the mating must take place under fair skies. Moreover, it is true that bees use the sun to navigate and also use it for the waggle dance to direct other bees towards the source of nectar or honey. Could he be right about why colonies collapse?