Back in 2007, Wired Magazine mused:
It’s only slightly less ridiculous than the other bee killing theory that year – cell phones.
I published a story about the loony idea that was proposed by some researcher in Europe about “cell phone radiation may be killing bees”. I pointed out that it was garbage then, as it is now.
In 2012, I published a post saying global warming is off the hook for the issue, due to the discovery of a phorid fly parasite that had been spreading through colonies due in part to the commercial trucking of bees on demand.
Now in a new set of data from USDA, publicized in a story from the Washington Post today, it turns out bee colonies are now at a 20 year high, and that beekeepers have basically solved the problem on their own.
Call off the bee-pocalypse: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
The trouble all began in 2006 or so, when beekeepers first began noticing mysterious die-offs. It was soon christened “colony collapse disorder,” and has been responsible for the loss of 20 to 40 percent of managed honeybee colonies each winter over the past decade.
The math says that if you lose 30 percent of your bee colonies every year for a few years, you rapidly end up with close to 0 colonies left. But get a load of this data on the number of active bee colonies in the U.S. since 1987. Pay particular attention to the period after 2006, when CCD was first documented.
As you can see, the number of honeybee colonies has actually risen since 2006, from 2.4 million to 2.7 million in 2014, according to data tracked by the USDA. The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies — that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers — is now the highest it’s been in 20 years.
So if CCD is wiping out close to a third of all honeybee colonies a year, how are their numbers rising? One word: Beekeepers.
A 2012 working paper by Randal R. Tucker and Walter N. Thurman, a pair of agricultural economists, explains that seasonal die-offs have always been a part of beekeeping: they report that before CCD, American beekeepers would typically lose 14 percent of their colonies a year, on average.
So beekeepers have devised two main ways to replenish their stock. The first method involves splitting one healthy colony into two separate colonies: put half the bees into a new beehive, order them a new queen online (retail price: $25 or so), and voila: two healthy hives.
The other method involves simply buying a bunch of bees to replace the ones you lost. You can buy 3 pounds of “packaged” bees, plus a queen, for about $100 or so.
Beekeepers have been doing this sort of thing since the advent of commercial beekeeping.
Full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-off-the-bee-pocalypse-u-s-honeybee-colonies-hit-a-20-year-high/
End of a crisis that never was. Case closed, and climate was never to blame.
There is actual science and there are facts about the problems of commercial bee keeping over the last decade. The problems are not fiction, the problems were and are still serious. The causes of the problem are still in question — there may be multiple, concurrent, or contributory problems.
AGW was never involved and neither bee keepers nor entomologists thought it was (only activists and the media ever claimed so).
The fact that commercial beekeepers have managed to keep their industry alive and our crops pollenized despite the problems is a tribute to their technical and business skills.
There is still a mystery involved with CCD, it is still an ongoing problem.
It would have been a lot more informative to read a thorough discussion of the subject.
Thanks Antony for keeping an eye on the bees. One day I will have the time to correct some of the missconception I read in your post and on many comments, in the mean time I will love to let know the beekeepers that follows you that Varroa is no longer a problem, Glycerin Monoxalate is the solution. http://apiaraucania.blogspot.cl/2016/01/monoxalato-como-control-de-varroa.html (use the google translation tool, I write in spanish)
http://apiaraucania.blogspot.cl/2015/11/how-do-dead-varroa-looks-like.html (english)
In Hawaii we have a small hive beetle epidemic that adds to the Varroa mite problem. Losses wiped me out as a beekeeper. 7 hives 3 years ago, 5 hives 2 years ago, down to 2 hives this year then went on a 6 week vacation to discover both hives had swarmed off due to pests.
Commercial beekeepers rob the hive of winter stores of honey and feed their bees sugar water and other substitutes which leave the bees malnourished. Combined with the commercial insecticides and etc. a loss of 30% or more is to be expected . I haven’t lost a hive in four years (four years of drought).