According to the Bee Informed Partnership’s latest survey, released this week, U.S. beekeepers lost nearly 37.7% of their honeybee colonies last winter — the greatest reported winter hive loss since the partnership started its surveys 13 years ago. The total annual loss is 9% higher than the yearly average and has raised fresh concerns of the future of these hard working pollinators.

Researchers from University of Maryland, Auburn University, and other colleges reached their findings after surveying 4,700 beekeepers, managing more than 300,000 hives across the US.

Beekeepers had been seeing fewer winter colony losses in recent years until now, said Maryland’s Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the Bee Partnership and co-author of Wednesday’s survey.

“The fact that we suddenly had the worst winter we’ve had … is troubling,” Dennis said.

Alarm over the pollinators have only increased since 2006, when a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder became widely known. This problem, in which the majority of worker bees abandon the colony, has since receded but beekeepers are now faced with more general die-offs linked to disease, pesticide use and habitat loss.

Geoffrey Williams, assistant professor of entomology at Auburn University:

“It’s disconcerting that we’re still seeing elevated losses after over a decade of survey and quite intense work to try to understand and reduce colony loss. We don’t seem to be making particularly great progress to reduce overall losses.”

Bees pollinate $15 billion worth of U.S. food crops. One-third of the human diet comes from pollinators, including native wild bees and other animals, many of which are also in trouble, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (source)

Year-to-year bee colony losses, which include calculations for summer, were 40.7%, higher than normal, but not a record high, the survey found.

According to The Guardian, native wild bee species, such as the American bumblebee, are also thought to be in sharp decline. The troubles faced by bees are part of a broader trend of stunning drops in insect abundance around the world, although the exact contours of this crisis are obscured by a lack of data in many places.

The entomologists behind the Bee Informed Partnership said a number of factors were likely to have caused the deepening losses of colonies, including varroa mites, which are lethal parasites that have been spreading for several years in the US.

“We are increasingly concerned about varroa mites and the viruses they spread,” said Dennis vanEngelsdorp.

VanEngelsdorp said that the products used by beekeepers to remove the mites seemed to be becoming less effective.

As bee-friendly habitat is razed and turned into monocultural farms and housing, bees are deprived of nutrition-rich pollen sources and exposed to a range of potentially harmful pesticides. A growing concern is the role of climate change, with rising global temperatures and increasingly extreme weather events, such as wildfires and storms, posing a looming threat.

“Beekeepers have to be very dynamic in their response to weather and environmental conditions,” said Williams.

“If it is a cold, long winter, beekeepers need to be very diligent and make sure they have enough food for their bees to survive. On the other hand, warm winters can create favorable conditions for varroa mites, which means beekeepers need to know how to manage them properly.”

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