Bees are weird. A honey bee hive is an entire insect society dedicated to stealing plant sperm (some of you call that pollen).

Adult bees take pollen back to their hive where they store and ferment it into "bee bread." They chew up the pollen, mix it with a bit of honey and gland secretions, and then stuff it into a honeycomb cell. Then, in a few weeks, the adult bees chew up the bee bread again, and regurgitate it to their babies as food.

That is just one tiny bit of the complex honey bee life cycle. I mean, I haven't even mentioned the exploding penises, ritualized dancing, and secretion of home construction materials by their abdomens.

Bees are fucking complicated.

It's understandable that media coverage of honey bees simplifies that complexity. Our human lives are complicated, too. We like short, punchy news stories with clear linear cause and effect relationships. When our busy brains and complex bee biology collide, misunderstandings are bound to happen. Most people think the beepocalypse is about pesticides. You know what the #1 killer of honey bees is globally? Varroa Mites, a blood-sucking bee parasite.

This is a Varroa mite; blood sucking scourge of honey bees around the globe. Gilles St. Martin

Varroa mites are big compared to a bee. For humans, it's comparable to a tiny vampire chihuahua stuck to your body.

Do pesticides kill bees? Of course. But that's not the same question, though, as “How do pesticides interact with all the other things that harm bees?” Teasing out the cause of bee decline is difficult.

It’s not that there are no smoking guns; there are hundreds of smoking guns, all of which contribute to the decline of bees. The consensus among bee scientists is that honey bee declines are the result of multiple factors, working independently or synergistically. Here's a short list of things we know to cause bee colony declines and death:

Parasites (Varroa mite and Tracheal mite);

Exposure to pesticides we put in beehives to control parasitic mites;

Diseases (Israeli Acute Paralysis virus, Nosema, etc.);

Poor nutrition due to loss of floral food sources;

Pesticides in the bees' environment;

At least 14 other diseases, fungi, and parasites.

The biggest threats to honey bees are a combination of many factors – focusing on one exclusively won't help. I wish that the issue really was just the neonicotinoid class of pesticides, because that would give us an easy “off” switch for the problem. Ban the pesticides, bees come back. Solved.

But even if we did ban some pesticides – and deal with the giant economic upheaval in agriculture that would accompany that – honey bees aren’t going to recover, because they still are besieged by mites, viruses, and fungal diseases. That doesn’t begin to cover the issues with bee nutrition and forage diversity. Like I said, complicated.

New research out this week looked at the relationship of pesticides in pollen to honey bee colony health. A critique of past research was that it used extremely high amounts of pesticides–more than a bee would normally encounter in her life. The new research looked at smaller quantities of pesticides:

*Dively, et al. 2015. Assessment of Chronic Sublethal Effects of Imidacloprid on Honey Bee Colony Health. PLOS ONE: DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0118748

*

The researchers deliberately fed honey bee colonies the neonicotinoid pesticide imidacloprid in a dose-response experiment. They chose their dosages based on real-world measurements of pesticide levels; 5 and 20 µg/kg doses are in the reported high range of residues present in pollen and nectar in seed-treated crops.

They also included a 100 µg/kg dose as a worst-case exposure level, representing imacloprid applied to flowering crops. (That situation is what caused a large kill of bumble bees in 2013.)

The performance of the colonies, measured by the amount of brood (baby bees), capped honey cells, and capped bee bread cells, was not significantly different from the control (untreated) hives, even at the highest dose of pesticide they fed. They found no evidence that imidacloprid affected foraging activity during and after exposure in their experiments.

Over the course of the experiment, pesticide residues declined, eventually becoming non-detectable within colonies' beebread and honey. That's one of the things that makes imidaclprid such a popular pesticide; it is designed to break down quickly.

One year there were more "queen events," or creation of special queen cells, in the treated colonies, but that didn't happen the next year. And one year colony overwintering survival did seem to be linked to high doses of the pesticide, but wasn't linked the next year. That's consistent with mixed results of many other experiments with these pesticides.

Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a leading bee researcher not involved in the study, said in an interview "It's not surprising that higher levels will hurt insects. They're insecticides after all. But this study is saying that neonicotinoids probably aren't the sole culprit at lower, real-world doses."

In general, pesticides don't kill bees, but they do make all the other bee problems worse. Just like a Facebook relationship status: It's complex.