Agent orchestration resembles a bee colony: individual workers can remain alive, responsive, and apparently healthy while the colony-level coordination required to carry the work forward has collapsed.

We call the agent-system version Context Collapse Disorder, or CCD: an operational syndrome in which agents, sessions, tools, and services remain available while the shared constraints, handoff state, task ancestry, or authority required to continue the workflow has been lost. The analogy to Colony Collapse Disorder is organizational rather than biological.

The immediate workflow failure is only half of the security problem. During a context or orchestration collapse, agents may continue producing summaries, memories, reports, rules, and handoff documents. These artifacts can be fluent, internally consistent, correctly formatted, cryptographically intact, and free of malicious code while still containing conclusions derived from missing evidence or authority inferred from the wrong layer.

When a fresh agent later retrieves such an artifact as established knowledge, the faulty premise can re-enter active reasoning and generate additional corroborating artifacts. We call this semantic reinfection. Conventional antivirus and prompt-injection scanning are poorly suited to it because there may be no executable payload, adversarial instruction, malformed structure, or recognizable byte signature. Integrity can prove that an artifact has not changed; it cannot prove that the artifact was correct when created.

The presentation introduces an incident-inspired synthetic Bee Colony harness for separating recursive context degradation, deliberate handoff omission, dispatcher failure, and model behavior. The system uses factor-blinded conditions, a host-only required-fact oracle, complete context-lineage replay, immutable evidence packets, and fail-closed claim gates.

One initial four-condition study and three replication blocks produced a repeated additive pattern: source-anchored healthy context retained all required facts, recursive context lost one quarter, deliberate omission lost one quarter, and their combination lost one half. The experiment did not establish a superadditive interaction or historical causation. That negative boundary is part of the result: the same machinery that detects degradation also prevents an attractive incident narrative from becoming another contaminated artifact.

Attendees leave with a practical framework for determining what actually passed, which layer had authority to say so, whether inherited conclusions have independent evidentiary support, and how contaminated knowledge can be quarantined and safely re-admitted without destroying the historical record.