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A Third of the Nation's Honeybee Colonies Died Last Year (usatoday.com)
A third of the honeybees in the United States were lost over the last year, part of a decade-long die-off experts said may threaten our food supply. USA Today reports: The annual survey of roughly 5,000 beekeepers showed the 33% dip from April 2016 to April 2017. The decrease is small compared to the survey's previous 10 years, when the decrease hovered at roughly 40%. From 2012 to 2013, nearly half of the nation's colonies died. The death of a colony doesn't necessarily mean a loss of bees, explains vanEngelsdorp, a project director at the Bee Informed Partnership. A beekeeper can salvage a dead colony, but doing so comes at labor and productivity costs. That causes beekeepers to charge farmers more for pollinating crops and creates a scarcity of bees available for pollination. It's a trend that threatens beekeepers trying to make a living and could lead to a drop-off in fruits and nuts reliant on pollination, vanEngelsdor said. So what's killing the honeybees? Parasites, diseases, poor nutrition, and pesticides among many others. The chief killer is the varroa mite, a "lethal parasite," which researchers said spreads among colonies.
There is no threat to honeybees (which in the US aren't even native). Queens can be bred in bulk (there are tricks to make a hive produce lots of queens), and starting a new hive only takes a queen and a handful of workers. Beekeepers can order them by mail.
These dieoffs are not about fundamental threats, but economics. It means more labour and cost to beekeepers, which they have to pass on.
The Slashdot summary presents a pretty accurate description of the reasons for the dieoffs - they appear to be multifactor, but varroa is what you find most commonly in afflicted colonies.Note that annual dieoffs are normal among honeybee colonies - 15-20% over winter is pretty typical, although it depends on location.
Bees are amazing creatures, and many of their problems have been brought on by humans. There are many bee species around the world, and many have long had their own specific parasites, which they're adapted to. As people have moved around the world, they've taken honeybees with. As a consequence, they've spread all of these local parasites and diseases around the world, into European honeybees that have no natural resistance to them. Ironically some were accidentally spread by programmes trying to breed resistance to other pests and diseases, bringing in bee stocks from around the world (a big example being the Buckfast Bee). Also, attempts to optimize bees for docility and honey production ended up reducing honeybee genetic diversity; for example, the European dark (formerly the most common in northern Europe) was considered an inferior breed, and was reduced to just a handful of colonies. But it appears that the European dark has some natural resistance to varroa, as well as being better at defending its hives from wasps (they're also much better adapted to cold climate areas).
It's interesting the means different bee species use to defend against the pests and predators that they evolved to in their natural range. One of my favorites is how Japanese honeybees fight off the nightmarish Japanese giant hornet (don't look it up if you have any fear of being stung by a huge insect). It's far too well armoured for honeybees to hurt it, so instead what they do is swarm it and beat their wings like crazy, creating heat. Because their maximum survivable body temperature happens to be just a couple degrees hotter than the hornet's maximum temperature, so they basically cook it to death ;)
You're treating a symptom while the disease rages on. The fish rots from the head. Why not cut off the head?
"Enslaved" is a pretty mean way to describe having their shelter provided by the beekeeper, along with routine inspections for (and treatments of) parasites that would kill them. Yes, the keeper will rob honey from the hive, but not enough to kill it during the winter - and may well supplement the hive for the winter. Keepers that offer pollination services also move their bees from one rich food source to the next.
You're treating a symptom while the disease rages on. The fish rots from the head. Why not cut off the head?
You need a 6-hour course on human privilege to truly begin to understand.
When the queen gets old, the workers simply produce a new one (or several, it all depends on what are the larvae fed with) and kills the old. The hive goes on. BTW, the life span of a worker bee is several months, therefore over the queen's life span multiple generations of regular bees have died - this is normal.
Colony collapse happens when a large majority of workers die off relatively quickly, straining the food supply to the point that the queen dies or there are not enough workers to tend the larvae.
The recent trend of collapse is caused by a perfect storm of more potent insecticides used in agriculture, running out of chemical options to contain the Varroa mites, and regulatory decisions to reduce the number and amount of chemical treatments the bee keeper is allowed to administer.