The standard practice for commercial crops is to bring in commercial hives of bees for pollination season that are shipped together via truck from crop to crop and region to region.
Fishing vessels are spreading parasites at hyper-accelerated speeds. This happens when they clean the guts of infected fish at sea without prior treatment and when they discard untargeted fish in the same way; The parasites disperse exponentially, within a loop, when such parasitised food spreads through the trophic. This has already happened on a planetary level.
Also, to note, I think that if they start droping frozen guts into the sea as a treatment, our main defensive barrier at home (to froze fish some days before consumption) will eventually disappear when the parasites adapt (ie. not freezing them long enough until they die due neglect, would progressively disperse freeze-resistant strains in the wild).
The first time we tried to pan sear some fresh salmon was about the last time we ever tried fresh salmon. Holy crap that is an eye opener. Took a long time to get over that feeling of seeing the parasites and learning that that is basically expected in wild fish.
In NZ if you do your own fishing you freeze guts and frames so you don't stink your rubbish bin and you drop it back to ocean on your next trip. Keeps chilly bin cold too.
Varoa mites are incredibly hard to control. Back in undergrad I worked in a fruit fly lab, and we would periodically have outbreaks, despite being about the most isolated, sterile population of insects you can imagine.
I doubt that there's any hope at all of controlling mites in free-roaming honeybees. I'd wager that we've done damage with overuse of miticides (which are insecticides, btw -- the article doesn't connect those dots) in a misguided attempt to control nature.
There's a company called, Greenlight Biosciences, that's developing an RNA-based pesticide for Varroa Mites. Last I spoke with the CEO, he mentioned positive results from trials.
That's cool, in a "better living through chemistry", 1950s man-in-a-white-labcoat sort of way. But when it comes to this stuff, I tend to be a bit like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: they're so focused on whether they could, that they never considered if they should.
Probably the better solution here is to stop trying to do industrial farming of bees, and move to a system where local populations of pollinators are cultivated and maintained year round. But sure, RNAi is probably better than the chemicals they're using now.
Yes, mites are arachnids, but this point is pedantic. Miticides don't work by counting legs and body segments.
Consider Amitraz [1]. It is both an insecticide and a miticide, and the method of action is on the central nervous system. Fluvalinate [2], another common one, is also broadly toxic to many different organisms.
I would say that the pesticide immunity genes arise because of evolutionary selection, but once they come into existance commercial beekeeping practices quickly spread those genes from hive to hive and across the country.
You might be right that the physical distribution plays a role, but the partial selective pressure of insecticide is like a resistance-generating machine -- as anyone who has tried to kill cockroaches will tell you.
Regardless, I think we both agree that the extremely unnatural pressures of industrial agriculture are a root
cause here.
For example, Scandinavian countries that have made a concerted effort to only prescribe antibiotics to humans when they are medically necessary saw the genes for antibiotic resistance becoming less prevalent.
Unfortunately, America still allows agribusiness to feed livestock a constant stream of lower dose antibiotics, because doing so makes animals more efficient at turning feed into muscle.
Unless we change our farming practices there isn't much else
you can do. You have acres and acres of land that are completely dead (as far as pollinators are concerned) for almost all of the year and then suddenly every plant blooms all at once and then goes away.
This is what so few people realize -- farming, as it's practiced in the US, is basically mining.
It might appear to be lush nature, but the places we farm are deserts in many ways. We kill insect life, birds, mammals, and other supporting species. We remove most of nutrients from the soil and replace them chemically. A commercial orchard might as well be an Amazon datacenter from an environmental standpoint.
If we want to change things, we need to fundamentally alter the way we grow food. It will be a bit harder -- we'll need regenerative methods, less reliable methods, more human labor, more weed prone, etc. -- but we can build food production into something that's much more sustainable and ecologically sound.
Some farmers are already doing this, or experimenting with it, and I think there's at the very least a growing soil health mindset among small farmers.
Exactly. Honeybees are a monoculture bandaid slapped on top of the monoculture farming problem, and ultimately suffer the same fate.
Many people don't realize that honeybees are not native to North America. Bringing them in massive numbers crowds out the native species and causes further ecosystem breakdown. It's good that people now understand that pollinators are important and insects need to be protected. But that means prioritizing the health of native species and creating a healthier ecosystem from the ground up (literally).
I actually think this is where smaller more "organic" type robots and AI will play a role. We can do more restorative and mixed farming and then have a legion of robots doing all the picking. The way agricultural automation is currently with equidistant rows all with the same type of plant because it's basically impossible to make a machine that can take apples off a tree and pick blueberries but you can make a very optimized machine that can do either. Kind of like 10,000 cheap drones or 1 fighter jet.
I like to bring this up in regards to livestock. "If we shouldn't eat chickens, then why are they food shaped?" Well, they are food shaped! Most of the animals we eat are designed to be eaten, born and bred over thousands of years to achieve that goal. A chicken is a most unnatural animal. No other bird has any reason to lay 300 eggs per year.
Livestock is as GMO as they come, just on a longer scale.
FWIW, I am not opposed to GMOs broadly. But I am opposed to GMOs for the purpose of enabling more industrialization in agriculture. I don't see, e.g., red grapefruits as bad, even though they used an early form of genetic engineering (seeds were exposed to radiation in hopes of creating random mutations.)
I think I see your viewpoint and agree with it. It isn't a matter of "do we modify or not" but rather "how, when, and for what purpose? who benefits? does this damage the land or species lineage? etc"
What a strange response to "monocropping is bad, we should probably follow the science and farm in a way that keeps pollinators around and soil healthy". They didn't say anything about not having chickens or cows.... in fact most regenerative farming practices need chickens and cows (and pigs and goats) to make the soil healthier and keep pollinators healthy.
FWIW, I do object to the industrial raising of animals for food as well.
Have a few pigs rummaging around your food forest? Some sheep to keep grasses and weeds in check? Some poultry to remove pests and aerate the soil? Sure! Love that, it's using behaviors in complementary ways to create a healthier system.
Cram thousands of animals into cubes and process them with machinery? Truly awful in my view.
This reads as a kneejerk reaction to the mention of GMO as if the person you responded to has an agenda. I think their point is that we need to be aware of what is natural (aka tested to equilibrium over huge periods of time) and what is artificial (propped up by human practices on the relatively short timescale of centuries and millenia).
It seems the baseline drifts and we could stand to take certain environmental cycles and/or livestock lifecycles for granted as though they exist purely through evolution or untouched ecological processes.
And the only way for that change to happen is to bake in monetary incentives that help drive it, whilst doing so in a political climate that is just fine with the way things are.
I disagree. We can also continue to engage in revolutionary thought and practice locally. We can decide that collective and community health and wellbeing are more important than individual success. It's a more difficult road, but the capitalist mode of "just tweak the financial curves" is not the only way we can approach this problem. Just the most well supported today.
We absolutely should continue to engage in revolutionary thought and practice locally, but without buy-in by the owners of the system it will always be just that: "local"
From what I've read, the hives that are seeing these severe die offs are the commercial hives that are being shipped around.
It is possible to have local beekeepers who don't ship their hives across the country, and there are still untended wild hives. Those seem to be in better shape.
It is important to remember that the hives out in the woods are not wild but cast-off swarms of domesticated honey bees, and that the mating behavior of honey bees will fold in genetics from many hives in a region ( drone congregation areas represent feral and backyard and commercial hives in a rather vast area ).
The genetic research seems to point to the opposite happening - that because of pressures on honey bees from pesticides or pests ( and thereby viral pressure carried by various pests ) the feral and commercial populations track quite closely.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8991 - there's a lot here specifically relevant to this discussion but especially note the emergence of African Honey Bee genotype in wild populations. This paper is from 2015 analyzing the biodiversity response to the arrival of V. destructor ( varroa mites ) and Africanized bees were introduced in the early 1990s as well.
The take-away is that until you have a 3 mile separation of water, assume that populations of bees in a land area are more related than not and face similar pressures in a given climate, whether feral or managed. Honey Bees especially ( but of course every living thing ) should be managed with an ecosystem mindset.
a) African honey bees aren't domesticated populations, challenging your overall point.
b) A 3 mile separation is not substantial (though I grant you that if most of the bees in any given cluster are introduced, then it might lead to more homogeneity).
c) even within "wild" populations of whatever, you see local clusters of genetic similarity. It's been a while since I took population genetics, but IIRC this kind of local equilibrium was well-covered.
Also, I haven't read the paper, but the abstract sure sounds like what I'm describing -- a sudden population bottleneck leads to rapid evolutionary adaptation in wild populations:
"These findings suggest that genetically diverse honey bee populations can recover from introduced diseases by evolving rapid tolerance, while maintaining much of the standing genetic variation."
To be clear, the hives that are systematically reporting these severe die-offs are largely commercial hives.
There isn't a reporting structure for hobbyists. Look down-thread for an example of a hobbyist who lost their hive (and whose neighbor lost their hive).
Project Apis m. ( data source cited in the article [0] ) is not limited to commercial beekeepers, but many backyard keepers are not plugged in to the research on either end. I responded to the survey as a backyard keeper with 4 surviving hives.
Try this: go find a place that sells honeybee nucs (a starter hive). Then go to Archive.org and compare the prices 10 years ago. I took the first "storefront" hit on Google, and found archived pages back to 2016 --- in 2016, a queen was $40; today, $42.
This has been the practice for more than a century. We saw the steepest declines post 2000s. While it almost certainly isn't helping, it's not the one root cause.
As a Danish beekeeper: Who the hell uses a pesticide in their beehives?
I agree that keeping mites under controls is tricky at best, but I've never heard of anyone using a pesticide. Normal practise, even for commercial beekeepers is to use oxalic acid. That's not really something mites become resistant to. The other option is brood control, where you basically do a period of time with no brood, leaving the mites without the ability to reproduce. I can see the later not being tricky for commercial beekeepers as that is a lot of hives to manage. The same goes for removing drone brood during the summer, it helps a lot, but I wouldn't want to do it to hundreds of hives.
More and more I feel like the right option is the breeding of mite restistant bees, but that would entail doing nothing for a long period of time or crossing European honeybees with Asian varieties that can remote the mites themselves. The work is already being do, but it's still years away. We have found wild beehives, including abandoned beehives, which are fairly mite resistant.
> We have found wild beehives, including abandoned beehives, which are fairly mite resistant.
It seems that some Apis Cerana (Japonica?) are fairly mite-resistant; they bite and kill the mites (except for those within the drone cells, as far as I read). This, could be combined also with rising the hive temperature along two hours to temperatures able to kill the mites, included the ones within the cells.
What are the bees in your hive doing when you are using this oxalic acid?
Or if you have no brood for a period of time, I can see that this would decrease the mite population in the empty hive, but wouldn't the brood carry the mites with them wherever they have gone?
You put the acid in the hive, in an evaporator. The air in the hive then becomes acidic enough to burn through the exoskeleton of the mites. Technically it also damages the exoskeleton of the bees, but that's thick enough that the bee doesn't notice. You normally do this over a period of 14 days in late summer, early autumn. As the other commenter points out formic acid is also an option.
For brood control, you have two options. One is to insert special frames in the hive, these are designed to encourage drone brood to go in those frames. Mites (Verrora) attack drone brood more as the cells are bigger and can better accommodate the mites. So you concentrate the mites in those frames. Then every week you remove 1/3 of those frames and discard it. That's normally enough to keep the mites at bay. The second option is to trap the queen, she stays in the hive, but she's restricted from moving around and laying eggs, i.e. you keep her away from the cells in the frames. A brood cycle is 28 days, but mites don't live that long. Without any new brood continuously cycling, they can't reproduce as they mature in the brood cells. The down side is obviously a large temporary drop in you bee population, meaning less pollination, and less honey. I don't know many who do this, but from what I'm told it is very effective. I my guess is that you probably only want to do this to fairly strong/highly populaces hives.
The acid and drone frames are normal practise, carried out by all beekeepers. Minus those who experiment with breeding mite resistant bees.
So the hive is never empty, you just create an environment that's harmful to the mites. Either by being to acidic or not providing a place for their eggs to hatch.
Yeah, science.org is editorializing. The actual investigators say
> While viruses are a likely end-stage cause of colony death, other stressors such as nutritional stress and agrochemicals may have also played significant roles.
because their study just cannot tease apart the origin cause due to selection bias in the methodology. That isn't the point of their study. Their hypothesis was that miticide resistant varroa were killing (possibly already compromised) bees due to novel viruses and pathogens. Thus the use of current miticides won't help colony collapse.
I live in Florida. Both my neighbor and I lost our hive q few weeks apart. It happened very quickly and what the article mentioned is most likely what they got. We knew about the sharp die-off across the U.S. so decided to hold off bee keeping until it is figured out.
There are some technological ideas to help bees be healthier such as special bee hives which have more natural topology and help the bees spend less energy on cooling/heating the hive. Example for a cylindrical hive: https://www.hiive.eu/en/
I searched about this and found a German beekeeper with such hives,
In [1] he can not detect the Varroa within the hive, nevertheless he notice the behavior of the hive is as if it had it. In [2] the hive is already dead, then is when he find the Varroa. In the comments on [2], one beekeeper explains that when the combs are twisted the mites fall into the combs rather than onto the floor which is traditionally used to detect them ( The sugar [3] or CO2 technique to detect Varroa in any type of hive is recommended by other beekeepers in the comments).
[3] By comments on other videos about the topic, this needs around 200 bees which are placed in a container with grids to which sugar is added. When shaken, the Verroa falls and a count can be made. The topology of this hive makes it difficult to gather this amount of bees (in the video [2] one can see that the hive would have to be dismantled).
You don't typically have just 1 hive. It's usually a group of them.
You wouldn't need an HVAC per hive, but rather 1 HVAC for the swarm. Get a water mass, HVAC it to the right temperature, and then pump the water through the hives to maintain a good temp.
It'd be somewhat more expensive and you'd have to have enough insulation to make sure the water isn't prematurely cooling before reaching the hive.
Hives also tend to be really cheap. They are simply wood boxes. So you'd be competing with $100 wood box with $200 wood box and $1000 HVAC and plumbing.
Sometimes the old ways are best. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason, or they'd just call it the way.
Who benefits most from old methods and tech remaining a historical footnote, but the very people selling their new whiz-bang solutions for modern problems, which are themselves inherent to using their products and energy production and consumption supply chain?
TLDR: "According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal."
I’m an agronomist and ~ten years ago attended an yearly industry meeting where there are various presentations that we sit in on and gain “credits” to maintain various state licenses used to legally recommend and/or apply fertilizers and pesticides.
The one presentation I recall from that far back was a bee researcher that basically said exactly what you posted, whenever his team investigated colony collapses from varroa mites (as opposed to poor treatment from being moved to California), they’d find markers for multiple previously unknown viruses. Honeybees were basically having to contend with previously isolated viruses they never evolved to resist, all at once.
I also remember the xerces society trying protest and interrupt his talk because they wanted to blame (and therefore ban) pesticides only, specifically neonicotinoids. I generally really appreciate the work they do, but in this case they really came away as being dogmatic instead of helpful.
What gets less attention though are the many dozens of native pollinator bees that also were/are hard hit and driven to full/near extinction. These species also have to contend with food source loss, because they are very selective about the flowers they will pollinate because the require a certain nutritional profile. I can’t stop viruses or varroa mites, but I can at least recommend planting wildflower mixes native to your local area.
edit Rediscovered some old blog posts I found looking into the issue at the time and found enlightening. It’s a great example of the observation work that makes a good agronomist. Bear in mind these are from 2012, so no idea if they’ve updated their thoughts to something different.
Sorta related: If you're ever in Hawaii/Big Island, I highly recommend this place for the tour or just dropping by to taste some honey: https://bigislandbees.com
I love that they attach a big $ number to the alarm in hopes that it will resonate with the powers at be.
> Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the United States, generate between $20 billion and $30 billion in agricultural revenue
> U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter.
Christ, do we even have any bees left at this point?
It would need to be put in the context of what a normal annual die-off is. I expect it's not 0%, and perhaps it's normal for keepers to need to re-establish some fraction of their hives each year.
Of course, 50-60% sounds alarmingly high, but I don't know enough to be sure.
Actually, I just followed the link in the article (good job detailing their sources!) and it looks like 40% is pretty typical, but with large error bars. 62% is definitely high, but not as earth shattering as it first appears.
In the US, honeybees aren't native, and the bees we really need to protect are the native bees.
That said, most beekeepers expect to lose 30-50% of their hives every year. But most honeybee hives can be split into two hives every year. So if you can double (or even potentially triple, quadruple) each hive every year, a loss of 50% isn't catastrophic.
Prior to the langstroth hive, European beekeepers destroyed the hive entirely to harvest the honey. Mites and disease were less prevalent and insects were FAR less stressed by the environment.
The Langstroth hive was invented in the 1850s, and the first migratory commercial hives started in the US 50 years later.
In the 1940s we saw a steady decline in hives, but the hives really started seeing massive die offs in the 2000s.
So no, the timelines are not really due to shipping commercial hives. There's other, stronger factors at play.
AFAIK, this is only commercial bees, which have a pile of stressors (such as being shipped places frequently). Non-commercial bees are doing "better" (I remember hearing that they're doing fine, but poking around now that doesn't seem to be the case).
The other issue is crop pollination, which AFAIK has heavy reliance on commercial bees.
To a first approximation ~all honeybees in North America are commercial honeybees; the way it was put on EconTalk a couple years back is, "if you see a honeybee in your yard, somebody owns it."
Framing of this fact is one you need to be careful with. Consider that your skin is replaced every 28 days. Stated differently, you completely lose all of your skin every month or so. Of course, it is replaced as rapidly, but if you only discuss the die off...
That is, you almost certainly need to know a lot more facts about bees before knowing the die off rate is useful.
A branch of US farming again reaping the rewards of non selective non food-chain-toxic (not a phrase but for simplicity sake) chemical use.
These chemicals would have lasted much longer and resistance would have been much slower in coming (if ever) if they were kept in reserve rather than used by default...
There’s a truth we’re rarely taught in school and I find it deeply poetic:
The vivid colors we see in flowers, even those beyond our vision in the ultraviolet, and the delicate fragrances that drift on the breeze they're not for us.
They are nature’s love songs, composed to seduce insects.
All this beauty is a grand performance, meant to charm bugs into becoming messengers of life, carrying pollen from bloom to bloom.
Bees, though precious, are just one part of this ancient dance.
Moths, beetles, butterflies, each plays a role in this quiet symphony of survival.
And yet, this balance is being disrupted.
Greedy and short-sighted actions are damaging ecosystems that are far more complex than we understand.
But here’s the humbling part:
Nature will endure.
She always has.
She’ll shake us off like dust,
heal in silence,
and bloom again with or without witnesses.
No, we're waiting for humans to die off so that bees don't live in these conditions.
Eventually something will start to eat those mites, or the commercial honeybee will go extinct. One way or another, this problem won't exist.
Because there are some things that the market just won't do effectively. Basic science that takes decades to pay off is a good example. Somebody has to understand the biology so that decades later someone else can build a product.
Private foundations can pay for some of it - a lot of the green revolution was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation - but they don't have the resources of the federal government, and you're relying on the whim of a single family or individual.
Government-funded basic research has worked out really well for the US.
And yet, if you read between the lines, the funding cut had next to no impact on what is reported here. The third-party organization still did the work, it's not stated how the work was slowed (if at all), and the case that speeding it up would have affected the outcome is pretty weak -- remember, they’re doing a retrospective on something that has already happened, and the article points out repeatedly that they have no effective tools on the mites.
I understand why Science engages in activism like this, but sometimes they take it too far. Because the reality is that it’s not a matter of “bee research or no bee research”, it’s a matter of cutting this or cutting something else with the marginal dollar. It's not even clear from the article what kind of cuts were made to the program. The only mention of budget at all is a brief, unexplained sentence at the top of the article:
> As soon as scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught wind of the record-breaking die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs by President Donald Trump’s administration.
My guess is that the third-party organization (Project Apis m.) gets a grant from the USDA. But they probably also get funding from the industry, because this is an important part of industrial agriculture. It's the sort of lazy drop-in that you could do in literally any article involving a government-funded organization.
There has been a lot of chaos, and extremely poor treatment of employees throughout the federal government. For instance, firing people because they were in the first couple of years of their tenure and had fewer protections, but then lying to them and telling them it was because of their performance (without actually doing any performance reviews). Mass emails telling people to quit and find more productive jobs in the private sector. Firing, then re-hiring people when it turns out that their work was actually essential (this is a deliberate strategy from Elon and Vivek - they talked about it openly). Telling government workers that you want to put them "in trauma" (Vought). Arbitrarily cancelling important projects and re-directing people to do things like scrub websites of disfavored words.
If you have a small team of experts and you put a couple on administrative leave because you're trying to fire them, and a couple more retire or quit because they don't want to deal with the stress, and the remaining members of the team have to pick up the work, but they're also getting confusing and contradictory directions from their supervisors and are feeling threatened, you're basically going to have productivity crater.
I wasn't involved in this research - all I can do is explain how scientific research done at federal labs has been disrupted in general. (Plus some things that I didn't mention, like bans on scientists attending conferences or publishing or communicating externally).
Honeybees are not all bees, and are less important than wild/native ground bees[0]. By making this about trump, you are burying the lede here:
"Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal."
This is to be expected, eventually evolution will produce a small amount of a species that is resistant to a chemical, then those will likely be hyper successful at breeding. Honeybees are not native to the Americas, it seems like we've imported a major feast for these mites. Perhaps there's another organism that preys on these mites. Nature often provides the a cure with the poison.
A recent paper on this topic (same general message as on the linked website):
> We found compelling evidence that honey bee introductions indirectly decrease pollination by reducing nectar and pollen availability and competitively excluding visits from more effective native bees. In contrast, the direct impact of honey bee visits on pollination was negligible, and, if anything, negative. Honey bees were ineffective pollinators, and increasing visit quantity could not compensate for inferior visit quality.
> Feral bee colonies usually just die after 18-24 months. That's long enough to swarm repeatedly, so mite pressure isn't really a threat to honeybees as a species in the wild. They live long enough to reproduce and almost nobody tries to harvest honey from them for sale. There's basically no chance that mites will make feral honeybees go extinct.
Rather, mite parasitism's an economic problem that threatens commercial beekeeping [...]. Keeping bees alive with both mites and pesticides, especially in the face of climate change, is really hard if you need to make money doing it.
Yes - species becoming resistant to our efforts to contain them is the root problem. It's a weakness in an agricultural system that's dependent on pesticides. But we set up systems to address that problem. If those systems can't work as effectively anymore because they've lost the resources and the institutional knowledge, that is also a big, important story.
Resistance towards something without active pressure is quickly lost in populations due to the fitness cost of maintaining an unused resistance mechanism. The solution is sufficient rotation of pesticides.
Again, burying the lede of the article which is about the last remaining pesticide that was effectively targeting the mite colonies. Six months of lost work is not the make or break for this, as this mite has been identified as a problem for at least a decade. This is a *treatment* of the mite problem, for which we have over a decade of research, proposed solutions, etc on.
That said: this mite problem is because of our industrial agricultural practices by bringing invasive species into the country to create a honey industry. The solutions to this are generally a combination of the below (at a high level):
1. Evolutionary arms race where scientists in academia and industry consistently try to find or invent new molecules that will harm nearly exclusively the mite, or perhaps genetically engineer a more resistant honeybee
2. Improve sterilization practices and protect existing swarms, and quickly identify mite infestations that could wipe the colony out.
3. Change of keeping practices to more accurately mimic nature, which is a challenge, because these bees are not native to the ecosystem, and native bees do not face these pressures because of a variety of reasons in the colony life-cycle.
This article is not about how impactful the "efficiency improvements" the government did by removing stability and the ability to plan long-term that occurred earlier this year. That was, at best, a drop in the bucket for this specific problem. You gotta stop looking at who is currently in charge when you're looking at a problem that initially was identified in 1987[0].
The SLF infestation was met with a whole lot of handwaving, of "look how dangerous this is", but not much in terms of concrete solutions. Then the population naturally stabilized as predators started feeding on them with basically no action taken other than some city weirdoes stomping on them. Turns out you don't need almighty Scientists to do Nature's job all the time. If this situation is different I'm open to the idea that intervention is needed, but all this parroting of uninformed BlueSky propaganda claiming everything is going to fall apart any time now, just you wait, is getting old. In January planes were falling out of the sky because Trump, in February no more social security because Trump, in March we can't forecast the weather anymore because Trump, in April staglation because Trump, in May World War 3 because Trump, in June forest fires because Trump, and in July Trump is killing the bees. What will the madman do next!
I came from a town where farmers work with university scientists and the ones who don't are basically doing tourist farm stands. Likewise, I see the NSF + NIH funding cuts from fellow scientists, eg, cancer researchers, being cut, and hear from multiple agency leaders navigating it but cannot speak out publicly. But feel good about pretending scientists do nothing and modern medicine and food supply isn't due to them.
And yes, if you think the scientists self-reporting on their funding cuts are fake, the objective truth problem is most definitely you.
We're able to feed the world's population today because scientists developed disease-resistant and high-yield varieties of wheat, rice, and other crops, and because scientists developed pesticides and fertilizers. To feed a growing population, particularly with the threat of plant diseases constantly mutating, we basically have to keep doing that scientific work forever.
Most of those scientists work for the private seed companies not the government. Sure they started from government research but they then turned those ideas into real seeds.
Are staple crops the bar though? Like, I love rice, wheat, and potatoes, but I would be real sad to not have all the vegetables that are not wind pollinated. We've survive, but I don't think that's the bar, imo.
Most staple crops are not bee polinated. Wheat is ant polinated (so I've been told by local naturalists who should have the background to know - others are claiming wind).
"The flowers are wind-pollinated, with over 99% of pollination events being self-pollinations and the rest cross-pollinations.[6] "
No mention of ants, and the reference [6] says "Normally at anthesis, the lemma and palea are pushed apart temporally (lasting for 8–30 min) by lodicules swelling, and the pollen dehiscences from anthers and falls on the ovary to accomplish fertilization (de Vries, 1971)."
Partially. Corn is the big one that requires wind or humans. Rest of the staples do not
Potatoes and sweet potatoes are tubers. I started growing this year and learned a lot about it just from my backyard. No pollination
For example cucumbers not staple nor are peppers. Cucumbers need a bee or insect to pollinate unless the type that doesn’t. But they are low in calories so not staple and more perishable
While fruits, vegetables and nuts can be pollinated by wind, that won't work at the scale and yields that our aggro-industrial complex needs. If it weren't required, almond growers wouldn't pay to have millions of hives transported to California each year to pollinate their trees.
I said staple crops (which is relevant when someone is claiming that "bees die" implies "we all starve"). It would be very sad to not have insect pollinated crops, but it wouldn't be an existential disaster.
I just logged on for the first time in months to downvote this too. If HN is going to be full of threads of people reposting AI garbage slop I will quickly find somewhere else to...do whatever it is I do here. Keep your AI bullshit to yourself, I do not trust a word of ANY of it.
Please don't copy / paste AI summaries, if I wanted Google search results I'd use Google myself. It's like posting the passive-aggressive lmgtfy.com link. Thanks for disclosing your comment is AI generated at least.
How to counter parasitic mites?
Aren't there new LLM applications for chemicals discovery?
> According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide — or miticide — of its kind left in humans’ arsenal
Nothing needs to eat them, they just need to be manageable for the bee pops. The way that native colonies work, it just doesn't matter. The colonies size is essentially never greater than a few and often don't form colonies at all, so mites don't have really any good transmission vector.
> [FDA] will encourage researchers to use computer modeling and artificial intelligence to predict how a drug will perform, as well as organs-on-a-chip, which are miniaturized devices that mimic organs and tissues. And to determine effectiveness, the FDA will begin using existing, real-world safety data from other countries where a drug has already been studied in humans.
> FDA published a draft guidance in 2025 titled, “Considerations for the Use of Artificial Intelligence to Support Regulatory Decision Making for Drug and Biological Products.”
The standard practice for commercial crops is to bring in commercial hives of bees for pollination season that are shipped together via truck from crop to crop and region to region.
https://sweetharvestfoods.com/the-commercial-honey-bee-trave...
That sounds like a great opportunity to spread the resistant parasites from hive to hive and region to region.
OffTopic: Something similar to fishing vessels,
Fishing vessels are spreading parasites at hyper-accelerated speeds. This happens when they clean the guts of infected fish at sea without prior treatment and when they discard untargeted fish in the same way; The parasites disperse exponentially, within a loop, when such parasitised food spreads through the trophic. This has already happened on a planetary level.
Also, to note, I think that if they start droping frozen guts into the sea as a treatment, our main defensive barrier at home (to froze fish some days before consumption) will eventually disappear when the parasites adapt (ie. not freezing them long enough until they die due neglect, would progressively disperse freeze-resistant strains in the wild).
First time I hear someone is freezing fresh fish at home. Everyone I know tries to eat fresh never-frozen fish.
I thought the main barier is to apply intense heat to the fish, not to freeze it.
In places where fish is eaten raw (or lightly pickled) you NEED to freeze it before preparing it. Anisakis is no joke.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisakis
The first time we tried to pan sear some fresh salmon was about the last time we ever tried fresh salmon. Holy crap that is an eye opener. Took a long time to get over that feeling of seeing the parasites and learning that that is basically expected in wild fish.
In NZ if you do your own fishing you freeze guts and frames so you don't stink your rubbish bin and you drop it back to ocean on your next trip. Keeps chilly bin cold too.
Varoa mites are incredibly hard to control. Back in undergrad I worked in a fruit fly lab, and we would periodically have outbreaks, despite being about the most isolated, sterile population of insects you can imagine.
I doubt that there's any hope at all of controlling mites in free-roaming honeybees. I'd wager that we've done damage with overuse of miticides (which are insecticides, btw -- the article doesn't connect those dots) in a misguided attempt to control nature.
There's a company called, Greenlight Biosciences, that's developing an RNA-based pesticide for Varroa Mites. Last I spoke with the CEO, he mentioned positive results from trials.
https://www.greenlightbiosciences.com/in-the-pipeline-protec...
That's cool, in a "better living through chemistry", 1950s man-in-a-white-labcoat sort of way. But when it comes to this stuff, I tend to be a bit like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: they're so focused on whether they could, that they never considered if they should.
Probably the better solution here is to stop trying to do industrial farming of bees, and move to a system where local populations of pollinators are cultivated and maintained year round. But sure, RNAi is probably better than the chemicals they're using now.
> miticides (which are insecticides, btw Mites are not insects, so miticides are not necessarily insecticides, no?
Yes, mites are arachnids, but this point is pedantic. Miticides don't work by counting legs and body segments.
Consider Amitraz [1]. It is both an insecticide and a miticide, and the method of action is on the central nervous system. Fluvalinate [2], another common one, is also broadly toxic to many different organisms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amitraz
[2] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Fluvalinate
Correct, miticides and insecticides are both pesticides but mites are arachnids while insects are, well, insects.
> I doubt that there's any hope at all of controlling mites
I'm more interested in no longer spreading the mite gene(s) for pesticide immunity across the country.
Well that’s easy: stop using miticide.
The resistance genes are not spreading due to physical transport, they’re spreading because of evolutionary selection.
I would say that the pesticide immunity genes arise because of evolutionary selection, but once they come into existance commercial beekeeping practices quickly spread those genes from hive to hive and across the country.
You might be right that the physical distribution plays a role, but the partial selective pressure of insecticide is like a resistance-generating machine -- as anyone who has tried to kill cockroaches will tell you.
Regardless, I think we both agree that the extremely unnatural pressures of industrial agriculture are a root cause here.
Certainly.
For example, Scandinavian countries that have made a concerted effort to only prescribe antibiotics to humans when they are medically necessary saw the genes for antibiotic resistance becoming less prevalent.
Unfortunately, America still allows agribusiness to feed livestock a constant stream of lower dose antibiotics, because doing so makes animals more efficient at turning feed into muscle.
Doesn't even seem like this is something that couldn't or shouldn't be region locked.
These companies are likely aren't saving more than a few percentage by centralizing and distributing.
Unless we change our farming practices there isn't much else you can do. You have acres and acres of land that are completely dead (as far as pollinators are concerned) for almost all of the year and then suddenly every plant blooms all at once and then goes away.
This is what so few people realize -- farming, as it's practiced in the US, is basically mining.
It might appear to be lush nature, but the places we farm are deserts in many ways. We kill insect life, birds, mammals, and other supporting species. We remove most of nutrients from the soil and replace them chemically. A commercial orchard might as well be an Amazon datacenter from an environmental standpoint.
If we want to change things, we need to fundamentally alter the way we grow food. It will be a bit harder -- we'll need regenerative methods, less reliable methods, more human labor, more weed prone, etc. -- but we can build food production into something that's much more sustainable and ecologically sound.
Some farmers are already doing this, or experimenting with it, and I think there's at the very least a growing soil health mindset among small farmers.
Exactly. Honeybees are a monoculture bandaid slapped on top of the monoculture farming problem, and ultimately suffer the same fate.
Many people don't realize that honeybees are not native to North America. Bringing them in massive numbers crowds out the native species and causes further ecosystem breakdown. It's good that people now understand that pollinators are important and insects need to be protected. But that means prioritizing the health of native species and creating a healthier ecosystem from the ground up (literally).
I actually think this is where smaller more "organic" type robots and AI will play a role. We can do more restorative and mixed farming and then have a legion of robots doing all the picking. The way agricultural automation is currently with equidistant rows all with the same type of plant because it's basically impossible to make a machine that can take apples off a tree and pick blueberries but you can make a very optimized machine that can do either. Kind of like 10,000 cheap drones or 1 fighter jet.
I like to bring this up in regards to livestock. "If we shouldn't eat chickens, then why are they food shaped?" Well, they are food shaped! Most of the animals we eat are designed to be eaten, born and bred over thousands of years to achieve that goal. A chicken is a most unnatural animal. No other bird has any reason to lay 300 eggs per year.
Livestock is as GMO as they come, just on a longer scale.
The comment you responded to didn't say anything about GMO
The comment GP responded to was talking about how we have modified the environments of farms - talking about GMO livestock is a stone's toss away.
FWIW, I am not opposed to GMOs broadly. But I am opposed to GMOs for the purpose of enabling more industrialization in agriculture. I don't see, e.g., red grapefruits as bad, even though they used an early form of genetic engineering (seeds were exposed to radiation in hopes of creating random mutations.)
I think I see your viewpoint and agree with it. It isn't a matter of "do we modify or not" but rather "how, when, and for what purpose? who benefits? does this damage the land or species lineage? etc"
What a strange response to "monocropping is bad, we should probably follow the science and farm in a way that keeps pollinators around and soil healthy". They didn't say anything about not having chickens or cows.... in fact most regenerative farming practices need chickens and cows (and pigs and goats) to make the soil healthier and keep pollinators healthy.
FWIW, I do object to the industrial raising of animals for food as well.
Have a few pigs rummaging around your food forest? Some sheep to keep grasses and weeds in check? Some poultry to remove pests and aerate the soil? Sure! Love that, it's using behaviors in complementary ways to create a healthier system.
Cram thousands of animals into cubes and process them with machinery? Truly awful in my view.
This reads as a kneejerk reaction to the mention of GMO as if the person you responded to has an agenda. I think their point is that we need to be aware of what is natural (aka tested to equilibrium over huge periods of time) and what is artificial (propped up by human practices on the relatively short timescale of centuries and millenia).
It seems the baseline drifts and we could stand to take certain environmental cycles and/or livestock lifecycles for granted as though they exist purely through evolution or untouched ecological processes.
And the only way for that change to happen is to bake in monetary incentives that help drive it, whilst doing so in a political climate that is just fine with the way things are.
I disagree. We can also continue to engage in revolutionary thought and practice locally. We can decide that collective and community health and wellbeing are more important than individual success. It's a more difficult road, but the capitalist mode of "just tweak the financial curves" is not the only way we can approach this problem. Just the most well supported today.
We absolutely should continue to engage in revolutionary thought and practice locally, but without buy-in by the owners of the system it will always be just that: "local"
From what I've read, the hives that are seeing these severe die offs are the commercial hives that are being shipped around.
It is possible to have local beekeepers who don't ship their hives across the country, and there are still untended wild hives. Those seem to be in better shape.
Untended wild hives are probably also more genetically diverse, and therefore more robust to parasites and viruses.
It is important to remember that the hives out in the woods are not wild but cast-off swarms of domesticated honey bees, and that the mating behavior of honey bees will fold in genetics from many hives in a region ( drone congregation areas represent feral and backyard and commercial hives in a rather vast area ).
The genetic research seems to point to the opposite happening - that because of pressures on honey bees from pesticides or pests ( and thereby viral pressure carried by various pests ) the feral and commercial populations track quite closely.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8991 - there's a lot here specifically relevant to this discussion but especially note the emergence of African Honey Bee genotype in wild populations. This paper is from 2015 analyzing the biodiversity response to the arrival of V. destructor ( varroa mites ) and Africanized bees were introduced in the early 1990s as well.
The take-away is that until you have a 3 mile separation of water, assume that populations of bees in a land area are more related than not and face similar pressures in a given climate, whether feral or managed. Honey Bees especially ( but of course every living thing ) should be managed with an ecosystem mindset.
A few things:
a) African honey bees aren't domesticated populations, challenging your overall point.
b) A 3 mile separation is not substantial (though I grant you that if most of the bees in any given cluster are introduced, then it might lead to more homogeneity).
c) even within "wild" populations of whatever, you see local clusters of genetic similarity. It's been a while since I took population genetics, but IIRC this kind of local equilibrium was well-covered.
Also, I haven't read the paper, but the abstract sure sounds like what I'm describing -- a sudden population bottleneck leads to rapid evolutionary adaptation in wild populations:
"These findings suggest that genetically diverse honey bee populations can recover from introduced diseases by evolving rapid tolerance, while maintaining much of the standing genetic variation."
To be clear, the hives that are systematically reporting these severe die-offs are largely commercial hives.
There isn't a reporting structure for hobbyists. Look down-thread for an example of a hobbyist who lost their hive (and whose neighbor lost their hive).
This isn't limited to big operators.
Project Apis m. ( data source cited in the article [0] ) is not limited to commercial beekeepers, but many backyard keepers are not plugged in to the research on either end. I responded to the survey as a backyard keeper with 4 surviving hives.
[0] https://www.projectapism.org/colony-loss-information
Try this: go find a place that sells honeybee nucs (a starter hive). Then go to Archive.org and compare the prices 10 years ago. I took the first "storefront" hit on Google, and found archived pages back to 2016 --- in 2016, a queen was $40; today, $42.
If it's a collapse it seems like a slow collapse.
This has been the practice for more than a century. We saw the steepest declines post 2000s. While it almost certainly isn't helping, it's not the one root cause.
The practice wouldn't be problematic until after the parasites you are shipping with the hives evolve pesticide resistance/immunity.
As soon as that gene arises, spreading it across the country becomes a bad idea.
hives not open whole year have no mites.
im not providing anything to anyone. i live with this statement as a fact. i will not comment anymore in this discussion. be(e) free to downvote.
This is simply, objectively false.
As a Danish beekeeper: Who the hell uses a pesticide in their beehives?
I agree that keeping mites under controls is tricky at best, but I've never heard of anyone using a pesticide. Normal practise, even for commercial beekeepers is to use oxalic acid. That's not really something mites become resistant to. The other option is brood control, where you basically do a period of time with no brood, leaving the mites without the ability to reproduce. I can see the later not being tricky for commercial beekeepers as that is a lot of hives to manage. The same goes for removing drone brood during the summer, it helps a lot, but I wouldn't want to do it to hundreds of hives.
More and more I feel like the right option is the breeding of mite restistant bees, but that would entail doing nothing for a long period of time or crossing European honeybees with Asian varieties that can remote the mites themselves. The work is already being do, but it's still years away. We have found wild beehives, including abandoned beehives, which are fairly mite resistant.
> We have found wild beehives, including abandoned beehives, which are fairly mite resistant.
It seems that some Apis Cerana (Japonica?) are fairly mite-resistant; they bite and kill the mites (except for those within the drone cells, as far as I read). This, could be combined also with rising the hive temperature along two hours to temperatures able to kill the mites, included the ones within the cells.
PS: I have only read a little about the matter.
What are the bees in your hive doing when you are using this oxalic acid?
Or if you have no brood for a period of time, I can see that this would decrease the mite population in the empty hive, but wouldn't the brood carry the mites with them wherever they have gone?
(these are serious questions, not challenges)
You put the acid in the hive, in an evaporator. The air in the hive then becomes acidic enough to burn through the exoskeleton of the mites. Technically it also damages the exoskeleton of the bees, but that's thick enough that the bee doesn't notice. You normally do this over a period of 14 days in late summer, early autumn. As the other commenter points out formic acid is also an option.
For brood control, you have two options. One is to insert special frames in the hive, these are designed to encourage drone brood to go in those frames. Mites (Verrora) attack drone brood more as the cells are bigger and can better accommodate the mites. So you concentrate the mites in those frames. Then every week you remove 1/3 of those frames and discard it. That's normally enough to keep the mites at bay. The second option is to trap the queen, she stays in the hive, but she's restricted from moving around and laying eggs, i.e. you keep her away from the cells in the frames. A brood cycle is 28 days, but mites don't live that long. Without any new brood continuously cycling, they can't reproduce as they mature in the brood cells. The down side is obviously a large temporary drop in you bee population, meaning less pollination, and less honey. I don't know many who do this, but from what I'm told it is very effective. I my guess is that you probably only want to do this to fairly strong/highly populaces hives.
The acid and drone frames are normal practise, carried out by all beekeepers. Minus those who experiment with breeding mite resistant bees.
So the hive is never empty, you just create an environment that's harmful to the mites. Either by being to acidic or not providing a place for their eggs to hatch.
You can use formic acid too
Yeah, science.org is editorializing. The actual investigators say
> While viruses are a likely end-stage cause of colony death, other stressors such as nutritional stress and agrochemicals may have also played significant roles.
because their study just cannot tease apart the origin cause due to selection bias in the methodology. That isn't the point of their study. Their hypothesis was that miticide resistant varroa were killing (possibly already compromised) bees due to novel viruses and pathogens. Thus the use of current miticides won't help colony collapse.
I live in Florida. Both my neighbor and I lost our hive q few weeks apart. It happened very quickly and what the article mentioned is most likely what they got. We knew about the sharp die-off across the U.S. so decided to hold off bee keeping until it is figured out.
there is a survey slideshow and a raw research paper linked in that article. these colony numbers are beyond awful.
There are some technological ideas to help bees be healthier such as special bee hives which have more natural topology and help the bees spend less energy on cooling/heating the hive. Example for a cylindrical hive: https://www.hiive.eu/en/
I searched about this and found a German beekeeper with such hives,
In [1] he can not detect the Varroa within the hive, nevertheless he notice the behavior of the hive is as if it had it. In [2] the hive is already dead, then is when he find the Varroa. In the comments on [2], one beekeeper explains that when the combs are twisted the mites fall into the combs rather than onto the floor which is traditionally used to detect them ( The sugar [3] or CO2 technique to detect Varroa in any type of hive is recommended by other beekeepers in the comments).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYKL7hrp23k HIIVE Confusion
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsdHyRdpfB0 All the bees dead - why Varroa was so treacherous here
[3] By comments on other videos about the topic, this needs around 200 bees which are placed in a container with grids to which sugar is added. When shaken, the Verroa falls and a count can be made. The topology of this hive makes it difficult to gather this amount of bees (in the video [2] one can see that the hive would have to be dismantled).
We could install HVAC in each hive.
Can heat pumps be scaled down to that size?
You don't typically have just 1 hive. It's usually a group of them.
You wouldn't need an HVAC per hive, but rather 1 HVAC for the swarm. Get a water mass, HVAC it to the right temperature, and then pump the water through the hives to maintain a good temp.
It'd be somewhat more expensive and you'd have to have enough insulation to make sure the water isn't prematurely cooling before reaching the hive.
Hives also tend to be really cheap. They are simply wood boxes. So you'd be competing with $100 wood box with $200 wood box and $1000 HVAC and plumbing.
There may be passive geothermal heat pump architectures that would be a good fit. Surprised that you can still learn about geothermal heat pumps from the U.S. government: https://www.energy.gov/eere/geothermal/geothermal-heat-pumps
Commercial hives need to be portable. Geothermal isn't that.
Peltier heat pumps, though less efficient than other types, can be made very small and have no moving parts.
> though less efficient than other types
IIRC they are _massively_ less efficient. Relevant Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnMRePtHMZY
there are simple, no power, designs that have existed for a long time that would be a better way to go.
kiss
I'm thinking something like a wind-powered rotating attic fan.
No power and no moving parts are good design goals.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher
Perforated Double Skinned Exterior
Lots of cool tech from the past
Sometimes the old ways are best. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason, or they'd just call it the way.
Who benefits most from old methods and tech remaining a historical footnote, but the very people selling their new whiz-bang solutions for modern problems, which are themselves inherent to using their products and energy production and consumption supply chain?
From a few weeks ago - https://civileats.com/2025/06/11/honey-bees-learn-to-fight-d....
TLDR: "According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal."
I’m an agronomist and ~ten years ago attended an yearly industry meeting where there are various presentations that we sit in on and gain “credits” to maintain various state licenses used to legally recommend and/or apply fertilizers and pesticides.
The one presentation I recall from that far back was a bee researcher that basically said exactly what you posted, whenever his team investigated colony collapses from varroa mites (as opposed to poor treatment from being moved to California), they’d find markers for multiple previously unknown viruses. Honeybees were basically having to contend with previously isolated viruses they never evolved to resist, all at once.
I also remember the xerces society trying protest and interrupt his talk because they wanted to blame (and therefore ban) pesticides only, specifically neonicotinoids. I generally really appreciate the work they do, but in this case they really came away as being dogmatic instead of helpful.
What gets less attention though are the many dozens of native pollinator bees that also were/are hard hit and driven to full/near extinction. These species also have to contend with food source loss, because they are very selective about the flowers they will pollinate because the require a certain nutritional profile. I can’t stop viruses or varroa mites, but I can at least recommend planting wildflower mixes native to your local area.
edit Rediscovered some old blog posts I found looking into the issue at the time and found enlightening. It’s a great example of the observation work that makes a good agronomist. Bear in mind these are from 2012, so no idea if they’ve updated their thoughts to something different.
https://scientificbeekeeping.com/the-extinction-of-the-honey...
https://scientificbeekeeping.com/neonicotinoids-trying-to-ma...
You don't need that stuff. Oxalic acid or formic acid does the job.
https://archive.ph/tGxRx
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706v1 ( https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706 )
> Viruses and vectors tied to honey bee colony losses
> Zachary S. Lamas, Frank Rinkevich, Andrew Garavito, Allison Shaulis, Dawn Boncristiani, Elizabeth Hill, Yan Ping Chen, Jay D. Evans
Sorta related: If you're ever in Hawaii/Big Island, I highly recommend this place for the tour or just dropping by to taste some honey: https://bigislandbees.com
I love that they attach a big $ number to the alarm in hopes that it will resonate with the powers at be.
> Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the United States, generate between $20 billion and $30 billion in agricultural revenue
The only large number that would make the general populace care would be $30 watermelons.
> U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter.
Christ, do we even have any bees left at this point?
It would need to be put in the context of what a normal annual die-off is. I expect it's not 0%, and perhaps it's normal for keepers to need to re-establish some fraction of their hives each year.
Of course, 50-60% sounds alarmingly high, but I don't know enough to be sure.
Actually, I just followed the link in the article (good job detailing their sources!) and it looks like 40% is pretty typical, but with large error bars. 62% is definitely high, but not as earth shattering as it first appears.
In the US, honeybees aren't native, and the bees we really need to protect are the native bees.
That said, most beekeepers expect to lose 30-50% of their hives every year. But most honeybee hives can be split into two hives every year. So if you can double (or even potentially triple, quadruple) each hive every year, a loss of 50% isn't catastrophic.
you mean after the modern practice of truck shipping hives was commercially accepted, then "most beekeepers" expect that ??
Prior to the langstroth hive, European beekeepers destroyed the hive entirely to harvest the honey. Mites and disease were less prevalent and insects were FAR less stressed by the environment.
The Langstroth hive was invented in the 1850s, and the first migratory commercial hives started in the US 50 years later.
In the 1940s we saw a steady decline in hives, but the hives really started seeing massive die offs in the 2000s.
So no, the timelines are not really due to shipping commercial hives. There's other, stronger factors at play.
AFAIK, this is only commercial bees, which have a pile of stressors (such as being shipped places frequently). Non-commercial bees are doing "better" (I remember hearing that they're doing fine, but poking around now that doesn't seem to be the case).
The other issue is crop pollination, which AFAIK has heavy reliance on commercial bees.
To a first approximation ~all honeybees in North America are commercial honeybees; the way it was put on EconTalk a couple years back is, "if you see a honeybee in your yard, somebody owns it."
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Most staples wind pollinate (corn, wheat, etc). Bees are needed for a lot of fruit and nut production though.
Framing of this fact is one you need to be careful with. Consider that your skin is replaced every 28 days. Stated differently, you completely lose all of your skin every month or so. Of course, it is replaced as rapidly, but if you only discuss the die off...
That is, you almost certainly need to know a lot more facts about bees before knowing the die off rate is useful.
“The USDA and university labs are key components.”
Well, then, we're fucked.
I've let my yard grow wild, and there are a lot of flowers and a constant hum of bumblebees in the summer.
A branch of US farming again reaping the rewards of non selective non food-chain-toxic (not a phrase but for simplicity sake) chemical use.
These chemicals would have lasted much longer and resistance would have been much slower in coming (if ever) if they were kept in reserve rather than used by default...
It's asif nobody learned anything from monsanto
There’s a truth we’re rarely taught in school and I find it deeply poetic: The vivid colors we see in flowers, even those beyond our vision in the ultraviolet, and the delicate fragrances that drift on the breeze they're not for us.
They are nature’s love songs, composed to seduce insects. All this beauty is a grand performance, meant to charm bugs into becoming messengers of life, carrying pollen from bloom to bloom.
Bees, though precious, are just one part of this ancient dance. Moths, beetles, butterflies, each plays a role in this quiet symphony of survival.
And yet, this balance is being disrupted. Greedy and short-sighted actions are damaging ecosystems that are far more complex than we understand.
But here’s the humbling part: Nature will endure. She always has. She’ll shake us off like dust, heal in silence, and bloom again with or without witnesses.
So we're waiting for bees to evolve resistance to these mites?
No, we're waiting for humans to die off so that bees don't live in these conditions. Eventually something will start to eat those mites, or the commercial honeybee will go extinct. One way or another, this problem won't exist.
bu yazdiklarimdan onu mu anladin aq otistigi. Hepimizi geberip gidecegiz doga devam edecek
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Maybe, but that couldn't be about honey bees, which are an invasive species in North America.
How did we get to the point that everything relies on this discretionary funding? We have some serious design flaws.
It wasn't all that discretionary so long as the ruling faction was executing laws in good faith.
Because there are some things that the market just won't do effectively. Basic science that takes decades to pay off is a good example. Somebody has to understand the biology so that decades later someone else can build a product.
Private foundations can pay for some of it - a lot of the green revolution was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation - but they don't have the resources of the federal government, and you're relying on the whim of a single family or individual.
Government-funded basic research has worked out really well for the US.
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And yet, if you read between the lines, the funding cut had next to no impact on what is reported here. The third-party organization still did the work, it's not stated how the work was slowed (if at all), and the case that speeding it up would have affected the outcome is pretty weak -- remember, they’re doing a retrospective on something that has already happened, and the article points out repeatedly that they have no effective tools on the mites.
I understand why Science engages in activism like this, but sometimes they take it too far. Because the reality is that it’s not a matter of “bee research or no bee research”, it’s a matter of cutting this or cutting something else with the marginal dollar. It's not even clear from the article what kind of cuts were made to the program. The only mention of budget at all is a brief, unexplained sentence at the top of the article:
> As soon as scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught wind of the record-breaking die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs by President Donald Trump’s administration.
My guess is that the third-party organization (Project Apis m.) gets a grant from the USDA. But they probably also get funding from the industry, because this is an important part of industrial agriculture. It's the sort of lazy drop-in that you could do in literally any article involving a government-funded organization.
There has been a lot of chaos, and extremely poor treatment of employees throughout the federal government. For instance, firing people because they were in the first couple of years of their tenure and had fewer protections, but then lying to them and telling them it was because of their performance (without actually doing any performance reviews). Mass emails telling people to quit and find more productive jobs in the private sector. Firing, then re-hiring people when it turns out that their work was actually essential (this is a deliberate strategy from Elon and Vivek - they talked about it openly). Telling government workers that you want to put them "in trauma" (Vought). Arbitrarily cancelling important projects and re-directing people to do things like scrub websites of disfavored words.
If you have a small team of experts and you put a couple on administrative leave because you're trying to fire them, and a couple more retire or quit because they don't want to deal with the stress, and the remaining members of the team have to pick up the work, but they're also getting confusing and contradictory directions from their supervisors and are feeling threatened, you're basically going to have productivity crater.
OK, just for the sake of argument, I grant you all of this. How did it slow the research paper described in this article?
Secondary question, equally important: Had the research been done however more quickly, what difference would it have made to the outcome?
I wasn't involved in this research - all I can do is explain how scientific research done at federal labs has been disrupted in general. (Plus some things that I didn't mention, like bans on scientists attending conferences or publishing or communicating externally).
It’s no use. A lot of people simply cannot help themselves.
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Honeybees are not all bees, and are less important than wild/native ground bees[0]. By making this about trump, you are burying the lede here:
"Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal."
This is to be expected, eventually evolution will produce a small amount of a species that is resistant to a chemical, then those will likely be hyper successful at breeding. Honeybees are not native to the Americas, it seems like we've imported a major feast for these mites. Perhaps there's another organism that preys on these mites. Nature often provides the a cure with the poison.
[0] - https://choosenatives.org/articles/native-bees-need-buzz/
A recent paper on this topic (same general message as on the linked website):
> We found compelling evidence that honey bee introductions indirectly decrease pollination by reducing nectar and pollen availability and competitively excluding visits from more effective native bees. In contrast, the direct impact of honey bee visits on pollination was negligible, and, if anything, negative. Honey bees were ineffective pollinators, and increasing visit quantity could not compensate for inferior visit quality.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy....
Also:
> Feral bee colonies usually just die after 18-24 months. That's long enough to swarm repeatedly, so mite pressure isn't really a threat to honeybees as a species in the wild. They live long enough to reproduce and almost nobody tries to harvest honey from them for sale. There's basically no chance that mites will make feral honeybees go extinct. Rather, mite parasitism's an economic problem that threatens commercial beekeeping [...]. Keeping bees alive with both mites and pesticides, especially in the face of climate change, is really hard if you need to make money doing it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Beekeeping/comments/10jtmgk/wild_be...
> Perhaps there's another organism that preys on these mites. Nature often provides the a cure with the poison.
Have we learned nothing from the old lady who swallowed the fly?
Yes - species becoming resistant to our efforts to contain them is the root problem. It's a weakness in an agricultural system that's dependent on pesticides. But we set up systems to address that problem. If those systems can't work as effectively anymore because they've lost the resources and the institutional knowledge, that is also a big, important story.
Resistance towards something without active pressure is quickly lost in populations due to the fitness cost of maintaining an unused resistance mechanism. The solution is sufficient rotation of pesticides.
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Again, burying the lede of the article which is about the last remaining pesticide that was effectively targeting the mite colonies. Six months of lost work is not the make or break for this, as this mite has been identified as a problem for at least a decade. This is a *treatment* of the mite problem, for which we have over a decade of research, proposed solutions, etc on.
That said: this mite problem is because of our industrial agricultural practices by bringing invasive species into the country to create a honey industry. The solutions to this are generally a combination of the below (at a high level):
1. Evolutionary arms race where scientists in academia and industry consistently try to find or invent new molecules that will harm nearly exclusively the mite, or perhaps genetically engineer a more resistant honeybee
2. Improve sterilization practices and protect existing swarms, and quickly identify mite infestations that could wipe the colony out.
3. Change of keeping practices to more accurately mimic nature, which is a challenge, because these bees are not native to the ecosystem, and native bees do not face these pressures because of a variety of reasons in the colony life-cycle.
This article is not about how impactful the "efficiency improvements" the government did by removing stability and the ability to plan long-term that occurred earlier this year. That was, at best, a drop in the bucket for this specific problem. You gotta stop looking at who is currently in charge when you're looking at a problem that initially was identified in 1987[0].
[0] - https://tsusinvasives.org/home/database/varroa-destructor
The SLF infestation was met with a whole lot of handwaving, of "look how dangerous this is", but not much in terms of concrete solutions. Then the population naturally stabilized as predators started feeding on them with basically no action taken other than some city weirdoes stomping on them. Turns out you don't need almighty Scientists to do Nature's job all the time. If this situation is different I'm open to the idea that intervention is needed, but all this parroting of uninformed BlueSky propaganda claiming everything is going to fall apart any time now, just you wait, is getting old. In January planes were falling out of the sky because Trump, in February no more social security because Trump, in March we can't forecast the weather anymore because Trump, in April staglation because Trump, in May World War 3 because Trump, in June forest fires because Trump, and in July Trump is killing the bees. What will the madman do next!
I came from a town where farmers work with university scientists and the ones who don't are basically doing tourist farm stands. Likewise, I see the NSF + NIH funding cuts from fellow scientists, eg, cancer researchers, being cut, and hear from multiple agency leaders navigating it but cannot speak out publicly. But feel good about pretending scientists do nothing and modern medicine and food supply isn't due to them.
And yes, if you think the scientists self-reporting on their funding cuts are fake, the objective truth problem is most definitely you.
We're able to feed the world's population today because scientists developed disease-resistant and high-yield varieties of wheat, rice, and other crops, and because scientists developed pesticides and fertilizers. To feed a growing population, particularly with the threat of plant diseases constantly mutating, we basically have to keep doing that scientific work forever.
Most of those scientists work for the private seed companies not the government. Sure they started from government research but they then turned those ideas into real seeds.
Nature...uh...finds a way. It's just that next time, we might not get to be around to find out.
Honeybees are an invasive species in North America.
All the major staple crops are wind pollinated, not insect pollinated.
The ultimate solution to this problem will be going back to a suite of native pollinators rather than depending on non-native honeybees.
Are staple crops the bar though? Like, I love rice, wheat, and potatoes, but I would be real sad to not have all the vegetables that are not wind pollinated. We've survive, but I don't think that's the bar, imo.
When someone claims "Bees die = we starve" then, yes, staple crops are the bar.
Most staple crops are not bee polinated. Wheat is ant polinated (so I've been told by local naturalists who should have the background to know - others are claiming wind).
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat
"The flowers are wind-pollinated, with over 99% of pollination events being self-pollinations and the rest cross-pollinations.[6] "
No mention of ants, and the reference [6] says "Normally at anthesis, the lemma and palea are pushed apart temporally (lasting for 8–30 min) by lodicules swelling, and the pollen dehiscences from anthers and falls on the ovary to accomplish fertilization (de Vries, 1971)."
Partially. Corn is the big one that requires wind or humans. Rest of the staples do not
Potatoes and sweet potatoes are tubers. I started growing this year and learned a lot about it just from my backyard. No pollination
For example cucumbers not staple nor are peppers. Cucumbers need a bee or insect to pollinate unless the type that doesn’t. But they are low in calories so not staple and more perishable
While fruits, vegetables and nuts can be pollinated by wind, that won't work at the scale and yields that our aggro-industrial complex needs. If it weren't required, almond growers wouldn't pay to have millions of hives transported to California each year to pollinate their trees.
Aside from almonds what other crops are most bee-dependent?
I said staple crops (which is relevant when someone is claiming that "bees die" implies "we all starve"). It would be very sad to not have insect pollinated crops, but it wouldn't be an existential disaster.
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I don't mind using AI to help gather information but did you even read this?
I just logged on for the first time in months to downvote this too. If HN is going to be full of threads of people reposting AI garbage slop I will quickly find somewhere else to...do whatever it is I do here. Keep your AI bullshit to yourself, I do not trust a word of ANY of it.
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Please don't copy / paste AI summaries, if I wanted Google search results I'd use Google myself. It's like posting the passive-aggressive lmgtfy.com link. Thanks for disclosing your comment is AI generated at least.
Can drones help?
Not really. Once they mate and the queen is all set to produce new workers, the drones are expendable.
How to plant a pollinator garden?
How to counter parasitic mites? Aren't there new LLM applications for chemicals discovery?
> According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide — or miticide — of its kind left in humans’ arsenal
"Viruses and vectors tied to honey bee colony losses" (2025) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706v1....
Native pollinators don't give a shit about mites. Don't spray herbicide and nature will do the rest.
What in nature eats the mites that are killing the bees?
Nothing needs to eat them, they just need to be manageable for the bee pops. The way that native colonies work, it just doesn't matter. The colonies size is essentially never greater than a few and often don't form colonies at all, so mites don't have really any good transmission vector.
Have you read the article?
Do you believe that ecology will just resolve bee colony collapse due to mites?
From the article:
> USDA research points to viruses spread by pesticide-resistant mites, indicating a worrying trend
If nothing eats or kills the mites that are killing the bees, should we expect bee colony collapse to resolve on its own?
> How to counter parasitic mites? Aren't there new LLM applications for chemicals discovery?
hard to imagine that additional hubris will solve problems created by hubris
"Chemical knowledge and reasoning of large language models vs. chemist expertise" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44275471
From (2025) https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2025/04/11/fda-animals-do... :
> [FDA] will encourage researchers to use computer modeling and artificial intelligence to predict how a drug will perform, as well as organs-on-a-chip, which are miniaturized devices that mimic organs and tissues. And to determine effectiveness, the FDA will begin using existing, real-world safety data from other countries where a drug has already been studied in humans.
Also from 2025: "FDA to Use A.I. In Drug Approvals to 'Radically Increase Efficiency'" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44252183
(Edit)
From FDA > "Artificial Intelligence for Drug Development" https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res... :
> FDA published a draft guidance in 2025 titled, “Considerations for the Use of Artificial Intelligence to Support Regulatory Decision Making for Drug and Biological Products.”
Anecdotally, it seems that the bee population has been increasing in the past few years - though still much lower than 20 years ago.