15-07-2025
After Devastating Winter Losses, Another Threat Looms for U.S. Beekeepers
Every January, Charles Linder travels from Illinois to Idaho to retrieve thousands of bee hives from a temperature-controlled storage facility. He loads boxes of hives onto a semi truck headed west for almond season, the first of many stops his bees will make on a cross-country pollination tour.
But two winters ago, Mr. Linder opened those boxes and discovered that around 90 percent of his bees were dead. 'It was gut-wrenching,' he said. 'There's an emotional loss from that. There's a frustration that you didn't do your job right. And then the economics hit.'
His experience was not unique. The western honeybee, Apis mellifera, is the workhorse of American agriculture, pollinating more than 130 types of nuts, fruits and vegetables — some $15 billion worth of the nation's crops — every year. But as the commercial beekeeping industry in the United States has grown, so too have its losses. Nearly 56 percent of managed honeybee colonies died off in the past year, according to preliminary results released in June by the U.S. Beekeeping Survey. That is the highest rate recorded since annual reporting began in 2011.
'Beekeepers, especially commercial ones, experienced a particularly bad year,' Geoff Williams, an entomologist at Auburn University who coordinated the survey, wrote in an email. The results, he said, highlight 'the tremendous strain honeybees and beekeepers are facing to safeguard our food supply.'
Honeybee health has been negatively affected by a combination of factors: unpredictable weather, habitat loss, pesticides and disease. But one of the biggest threats is a parasite known as varroa destructor, a Southeast Asian mite that arrived in the United States in the late 1980s. In June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that viruses spread by varroa were a leading cause of the past year's colony collapses, with an estimated financial impact of $600 million for beekeeping businesses.
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