Don’t Call It a Honeybee Comeback Yet

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Since hitting a low point in 2008, beset by the apocalyptic-sounding colony collapse disorder, America’s honeybees have been on the comeback trail. The number of colonies the U.S. Department of Agriculture counts is back up to almost 3 million, a level last seen in the early 1990s.

Beekeepers in the U.S. continue to lose about 40% of their colonies annually, though, according to the nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership. Its surveys, which date to 2006, don’t show a clear trend, but researchers have estimated that yearly losses before 2000 were much lower. Colony numbers can still rise in the face of such losses, because it takes only a couple of months to get one up and running, but all does not seem well with the bees.

Most losses last winter were attributed not to colony collapse disorder but to more mundane causes such as starvation and pests. Honeybees seem to have become generally more vulnerable, with two oft-fingered culprits being the varroa mite, a parasite originally from Asia that first appeared in the U.S. in the late 1980s, and the widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides by U.S. farmers starting in the late 1990s.

The troubles of the honeybee, a domesticated species not native to the U.S., have been linked to concerns about dropping insect numbers worldwide. But it’s not clear that insects in general are on the decline in North America. A just-published survey of data gathered at 25 monitoring stations around the U.S. starting as long ago as 1976 found insect population changes to be “generally indistinguishable from zero.”

• Life Cycle

U.S. beekeepers reported revenue of $309.6m from pollination services in 2019, and $309.1 million from honey, a big change from past decades, when honey was the chief moneymaker.

• Sour Taste

The USDA counted a record 5.9 million honeybee colonies in 1947, with that number falling to a little more than 3 million by the mid-1980s in the face of competition from imported honey and other sweeteners.

• Bad News Bumble

A 2013 study found that most native bee species in the U.S. had experienced only modest declines over the previous 140 years, but that bumblebee populations had declined steeply.

Fox is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
 
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