Nearly half of US honeybee colonies died last year. Struggling beekeepers stabilize population
Nearly half of US honeybee colonies died last year. Struggling beekeepers stabilize population
A new survey says America's honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies. But using costly measures to create new colonies, beekeepers are somehow keeping afloat. Thursday’s University of Maryland and Aubu...
Honeybees are a non-native livestock species. Their survival rates tell us nothing about the health of the ecosystem, only the agricultural practices.
The bees we need to save are the solitary native bees. http://xerces.org/pollinator-conservation
Thank you. It drives me wild that "save the bees!" campaigns seem to be all about domesticated bees and not the mason bees, bumblebees, and other native species. Also drives me wild: when folks recommend planting invasive species because "they support pollinators." Yeah so do many native species; wtf do you think insects ate for millions of years before we showed up?
This wouldn't be a surprise to anyone seeing the conditions pollinator honey bees are kept in. Most are distrubuted in cardboard boxes to fields to be used for pollination. Once they pollinate the fields they aren't really of concern to the farmers anymore. In my opinion, this is like saying half of cattle die every year, but populations remain stable. It's kind of by design, and in some cases the goal.
That's a temporary nuc box for live bee sales. Noone takes these to pollinate crops. Once they are done pollination, the grower might not care anymore, but the beekeeper certainly does. They either move on to another crop or return home to produce honey.
Every field I've been in has these boxes distributed for pollinating. From the product page:
There is no need for box returns and frame exchanges when cardboard nuc boxes are a fraction of the cost of wooden nucs.
So it's sold as a bonus that this does not need to be returned, so it's common enough practice. I know they are suppose to be used to seed new boxes, but farmers generally don't care. They want the flowers pollinated, the bees will probably die from the pesticides so no use in worrying about them.
Edit: There is an article from the guardian on the harmful conditions bees endure on almond farms. I am near smaller farms, so maybe this practice (of using nucs to pollinate) is not as wide spread as I thought. Regardless, bees are routinely mistreated in various agricultural settings.
Ahh interesting. Thanks for the insight.
Honey bee population counts are sometimes hard to interpret, since many colonies are split in half in the spring, with a new queen inserted into the queenless half to create new colonies. Thus, the number of colonies can be high, then low after lots of winter deaths, then high again after new colonies are created, then low again after the following winter, etc. Peering through those fluxtuations, it's clear that (1) honey bees aren't anywhere close to going extinct, but (2) it's still a lot harder to keep a bee colony alive than it was decades ago. New parasites, new pesticides, lower food availability due to habitat loss and/or climate change, etc. Commercial beekeepers who manage thousands of hives also have very different pressures and their bees have different stressors than people who keep a few (or a few dozen) bee colonies. This report that more colonies died than in previous years means that beekeepers' practices have a lot of room for improvement, but the bees won't all be gone by this time next year.
If anyone is interested in further discussion about bees and beekeeping, you're welcome over at [email protected]
tl;dr:
WASHINGTON - America's honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies, an annual bee survey found. Beekeepers told the surveying scientists that 21% loss over the winter is acceptable and more than three-fifths of beekeepers surveyed said their losses were higher than that. The overall bee colony population is relatively steady because commercial beekeepers split and restock their hives, finding or buying new queens, or even starter packs for colonies, said University of Maryland bee researcher Nathalie Steinhauer, the survey's lead author. Some commercial beekeepers who have succeeded in the past lost as much as 80% of their colonies this past year, while other beekeepers did well, it varied so much, Evans said. The demand for pollination from commercial bee colonies is growing even as the beekeepers have to work harder to make up for losses, Steinhauer said.
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