Commercial Bee Colonies in freefall

[angrychair]

Washington State University entomologists announced this week that commercial honey bee colony losses are projected to reach between 60% and 70% in 2025.

This is pull all the alarms, hair on fire, the sky is falling, bad.Without the bees we cannot produce enough food to feed everyone. Like a fraction of our numbers in the US. Especially so with the loss of immigrant labor. Also given more violent weather and with cuts, may not see big storms coming. Also with farmers losing sales because of USAID and other food assistance programs, I see a perfect storm of clusterfuck for the food industry.

Truly hope this is overreacting but this is bad. Of that I am sure

Link: https://abcnews.go.com/US/honey-bee-colonies-face-70-losses-2025-impacting/story?id=120191720

[no_hypocrisy]

1. My brother lost his three hives last year.

Not commercial. Small plot of land in rural Virginia.

[BoRaGard]

2. GOP solution: mini-drones with cute little buzzers

You can buy one from Private Industry (R) if you can afford it.

GOP's proposed bee replacement, for those who can afford it...

[Kaleva]

3. Commercial bees compete with native bee populations

Honey bees are native to the Eastern Hemisphere .

[Igel]

4. Close reading helps.

It's something that I've found newly graduated English teachers from at least middle-of-the-road schools aren't even very good at.

Take this quote from the OP:

Over the past decade, annual losses for colonies have typically ranged between 40% and 50%, marking a significant jump this year.

That sounds bad. 1 million colonies 9 years ago? By now we're down to a maximum of (.4)(.4)(.4)(.4)(.4)(.4)(.4)(.4)(.4) ( 1,000,000) colonies. 262. We had maybe 3 million colonies back in 2015. So I guess we have fewer than 1,000 now? Whoa varroa.

That's reductio ad absurdum. I've jiu-jitsued their claim to show that on its face, as it's very likely intended to be understood by the reader, it's utterly absurd and impossible.

Real numbers:

Honey bee colonies lost for operations with five or more colonies from January through March 2024, was 396,820 colonies, or 15 percent. The number of colonies lost during the quarter of April through June 2024, was
288,190 colonies, or 11 percent. During the quarter of April through June 2023, colonies lost totaled 378,190 colonies, or 14 percent, the highest number lost of any quarter surveyed in 2023. The quarter surveyed in 2023 with the lowest number
of colonies lost was October through December, with 254,520 colonies lost, or 9 percent.

That's a 49% loss from 7/1/23 to 7/1/24. A 23% loss in just the last half of 2023! So 60-70% for this an increase but not that much different a prediction from the observed one-year losses from 7/1 to 7/1, honestly. (Oh--the 2025 prediction was actually issued in 3/24. Unchanged for this year--they stuck to their long term model from over a year ago.)

This kind of loss is a total nightmare, absolute armageddon ... but mea culpa, I utterly garden-pathed you to conclude and own a falsehood, just like the article did (so I'm copying the writer's bad behavior, I guess). Maybe I should correct that falsehood? Sure.

Honey bee colonies added for operations with five or more colonies from January through March 2024 was [ sic ]
404,100 colonies. The number of colonies added during the quarter of April through June 2024 was [ ! ] 617,420. During the
quarter of April through June 2023, the number of colonies added were [ sic ] 618,350 colonies, the highest number of honey
bee colonies added for any quarter surveyed in 2023. The quarter of October through December 2023 added
118,840 colonies, the least number of honey bee colonies added for any quarter surveyed in 2023.

They added colonies, too. I guess that makes sense any given year--colonies aren't immortal. It's like only citing death statistics for a country and forgetting that new people are added each year. Look at the death rate for the last 100 years for the US and no more, we'd be down to a few thousand, I guess. But colonies aren't just lost, they're also rejuvenated or renovated and I'll skip that bit as affecting the number of colonies in the hives but not the number on the page.

From the same document--shifting the goalposts slightly by shifting the time interval covered, but the overall point still holds--sometimes you lose, sometimes you gain--

Honey bee colonies for operations with five or more colonies in the United States on January 1, 2024 totaled
2.71 million colonies, down 1 percent from January 1, 2023. The number of colonies in the United States on
April 1, 2024, was 2.71 million colonies. During 2023, honey bee colonies on January 1, April 1, July 1, and
October 1 were 2.73 million, 2.71 million, 2.92 million, and 2.82 million colonies, respectively.

So in the face of staggering losses, 23% just in last half '23, there were equally staggering increases. The numbers haven't increased much

What does this mean for 2025? No clue. But the 2023/2024 numbers are pretty much what we've seen for well over a decade. Breeding keeps up with bleeding. (Plus, I don't have that much hair to catch on fire, so I try to limit my losses whenever possible.

Had the "net losses" been predicted to be in the 60-70% range, or had there been 49% "net loss" from 7/1/23-7/1/24, that would be an entirely different story.

All numbers and quotes not from the OP's link are courtesy of Biden administration's USDA, and both public domain and pre-Trump. It's single-source reliance, but it seems like a decent source.

This doesn't mean there isn't a problem. Increased rate losses mean there are certainly new environmental stressors. But the loss rate predicted isn't all that much higher than the loss rate observed for the last 10+ years, since we "recovered" from the colony-collapse disorder epidemic/panic of the '00s. That, too, was to end up with no pollinators, but, while native bee populations continue to struggle and/or decline, the domestic honeybee population quietly rebounded. Plus this is just a prediction and, like all good scientific, model-based predictions, is subject to verification and falsification.

[Kaleva]

5. Smarty Pants!