The Honeybee Crisis Accelerates (UPDATED)

First, a few facts:

-- Bees pollinate 80% of the world’s plants including 90 different food crops.
-- 1 out of every 3 or 4 bites of food you eat is thanks to bees.
-- The honey bee is responsible for $15 billion in U.S. agricultural crops each year.

So, how are these indispensable workers doing?

Commercial honeybee colonies have had a rough run. And it’s not over yet. The annual loss rate for honeybees during the year ending in April rose to 40.7 percent, up slightly over the annual average of 38.7 percent, according to the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit group associated with the University of Maryland.

More troubling was this past winter’s losses of 37.7 percent. Winter bees tend to live longer, clustering in the hive to keep the queen warm. This winter’s losses were 8.9 percentage points higher than the survey average and the highest winter loss since the annual bee survey began 13 years ago. [snip]

The honeybee crisis of the past decade is often blamed on increased use of fungicides, herbicides such as Monsanto’s Roundup and pesticides called neonicotinoids. In addition to colony collapse disorder, in recent years bees have suffered from viruses carried by varroa mites, as well as problems with queen vigor, weakened immune systems and poor nutrition. Longtime beekeepers such as David Hackenberg say the bee life span has fallen to just 25 to 30 days. It used to be more than twice that.

The varroa mites seem to be the biggest threat to bee colonies today.  The problem is, they've been increasingly resistant to any pesticide that won't also kill the bees.  It's also not a problem that is likely to go away, even with continuing vigilance.   Beekeepers also cite extreme weather as a contributor to colony loss (you can file that under "climate change").

In fact, pollinator decline encompasses more than the essential bees;  butterflies and hummingbirds, for example, are important pollinators for certain plants, and their well- being is also challenged by the same use of chemicals in the ecosystem, though their decline has not been tracked as closely as the bee's.

Here's some suggested reading on actions we can take to sustain a healthy population of pollinators:

https://insights.osu.edu/sustainability/bee-population

https://impact.psu.edu/story/protecting-pollinators?utm_source=news&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=impact2019

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/sustainable-agriculture/save-the-bees/
 
UPDATE:  As you would expect, the Trump regime is doing its best to do the wrong thing.