‘Beepocalypse’? How US honey bee population is fairing

There has been an ongoing vigorous debate about the health of the American bee population. Bees play a key role in pollinating many agricultural products, and some environmentalists have been warning that they are dying off in record numbers, and may in fact be facing extinction. The latest report on the U.S. bee population continues to show that honey producing bees are at near record levels.

Click image for larger version.
Click image for larger version.

8 thoughts on “‘Beepocalypse’? How US honey bee population is fairing”

  1. I think that claim that no case of colony collapse disorder has been reported is B.S. The guy who owns the mail box store where I have a private mail box, also owns a number of bee colonies. He has had colony collapse this year. He said he doesn’t report them any longer because the government doesn’t do anything about it. But he has reported colony collapse in the last 4 years.

    Seems to me that they cherry pick their facts.

    Reply
    • Well, if people don’t report it how is anyone else supposed to know? Go around to every hive owner and ask?

      Reply
  2. Pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are used everywhere and kills more than honeybees. Frogs for example are dying off in record numbers. Atrazine turns male frogs into reproducing female frogs.

    Every railroad, road, around every transmission line, wind and solar farms, households by the billions, spray some sort of pesticide on their properties, wiping out life, including honeybees. Spraying also destroys the guts of humans, the same as how “so called pests.”

    Man is equivalent to the monsters in War of the Worlds.

    https://www.backedbybayer.com/vegetation-management/IVM/esplanade-200-sc

    Reply
  3. Permission to copy the above chart to another site (Deviantart, art site but lots of politics / anti-gmo types and such).
    Seems like every time I go looking for this kind of information I find your site. Thanks for being there!

    Reply
  4. This chart feels pretty misleading to me. It largely seems to focus on the impact on the human food supply, with words like “crop visits”, “honey producing”, and “colony level”, all of which refer to honeybees and their relatives, which no scientist is really arguing are in danger at this point. But it ignores the thousands of species of non-honey producing, solitary bees, and the thousands of important *wild* plant species (i.e. not “crops”) that they pollinate.

    The paraphrase from Sam Droege is actually in direct contradiction of what he has said publicly, e.g. in this recent article:
    https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-bees-you-know-are-killing-bees-you-don’t

    In that light this chart seems almost willfully misleading. Can you explain the intention and the scientific rationale?

    Reply

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