Commercial beekeepers lost more than 60% of colonies last winter, researcher says

Commercial beekeepers in the United States lost more than 60% of their colonies last winter, the worst overwintering losses on record, according to Jennie Durant, a bee researcher and author of the new book “Bitter Honey: Big Ag’s Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them.” Writing in an opinion piece published Wednesday, Durant said the causes are not the widely cited singular threats — pests, pesticides, habitat loss, or extreme weather — but the industrial food system itself.

Managed honeybees function as “the tiniest hired laborers in agriculture,” Durant wrote, contributing more than $15 billion annually to the U.S. food system. Along with native bees and other pollinators, they help pollinate more than 130 fruits, nuts, and vegetables in the United States. To accomplish that each year, bees are trucked cross-country from one crop to the next, fed supplements, bred for productivity, exposed to pesticides, and pushed to pollinate on a schedule.

California’s annual almond bloom, which Durant called the “Super Bowl of beekeeping,” provides what she described as a prime example of the pressures. Each February, beekeepers truck more than 2 million bee colonies to the state — more than 95% of the country’s commercial colonies — to pollinate 1.4 million acres of blooming almonds. As bees fly through orchards, they drift into other colonies and spread parasitic varroa mites, the industry’s primary pest, and the deadly diseases they carry.

Bees are also exposed to agrochemicals while pollinating almonds and other crops, Durant wrote. Almond growers sometimes spray fungicides during bloom to protect their crops, but because of current pesticide label regulations, sublethal agrochemicals such as fungicides or inert ingredients may not be labeled bee-toxic even though they can stunt bee growth, reproduction and foraging navigation.

The timing of almond pollination adds further strain, according to Durant. Colonies are not usually at peak strength in February, but growers want active, productive hives. To meet demand, beekeepers feed supplements year-round — which are expensive and can be less nutritious than natural nectar and pollen — and breed the most productive queens, which can be more susceptible to varroa mites.

Amid these challenges, commercial beekeepers rely heavily on income from almond pollination and other crops, in part because cheap, foreign, and often adulterated honey has flooded the market and driven prices below the cost of production, Durant wrote.

Beekeepers are also losing the floral oases where they historically produce honey, she said. Each summer, more than 40% of the country’s colonies are trucked to the Northern Great Plains to forage on native and conservation grasslands. Yet since the early 2000s, farmers have plowed millions of acres of grasslands to grow biofuel crops such as corn and soy, reducing forage for bees and introducing agrochemicals that can drift or leach off-farm and weaken colonies.

The Trump administration is adding to those pressures, Durant wrote. In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it would decommission the Beltsville Bee Research Lab in Maryland, one of only five USDA bee labs, which for more than 90 years has supported beekeepers with free disease detection, research on overwintering losses, and pest-control protocols. The shuttering of the Bee Lab comes alongside the planned closure of 57 of 77 U.S. Forest Service research sites, which oversee 193 million acres of public lands that provide crucial bee habitat. The administration also aims to decommission 16 research centers in the U.S. Geological Survey, including the Northern Prairie Research Center in North Dakota, which has studied how land-use changes in the Midwest affect bee health, and a USGS Bee Lab in Maryland that supports native bee research nationwide.

As losses mount, Durant said, beekeepers are likely to charge farmers more for pollination services or simply have fewer bees to offer. Those costs could ripple downstream, leading to smaller harvests, more expensive fruits and vegetables, and less diversity in the produce aisle. “Bee declines may seem like an environmental tragedy at the margins, but their losses destabilize our food system,” she wrote.

Durant called for restoring and increasing funding for pollinator research, maintaining and planting more conservation lands across the country, and requiring pesticide labels to better capture sublethal toxicities. “Bees and beekeepers have been doing their part,” she wrote. “It’s time our food system did too.”