Beekeeper Survey: “We’ve Lost Almost Half Our Bee Colonies in the Past Year”

According to a federal survey, more than two out of five American honeybee colonies died in the past year, marking the worst die off in almost a decade.

The survey was conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture with others in a ‘bee partnership,’ but what do you think they will do with this information since they are completely infiltrated by biotech interests (case in point, Tom Vilsack, for starters) – the very likely root cause of the bee die offs?

Study co-author Keith Delaplane at the University of Georgia said:

“What we’re seeing with this bee problem is just a loud signal that there’s some bad things happening with our agro-ecosystems. We just happen to notice it with the honeybee because they are so easy to count.”

Mainstream media says that “it’s not quite as dire as it sounds.”

Delaplane and study co-author Dennis vanEngelsdorp of the University of Maryland explain that “after a colony dies, beekeepers then split their surviving colonies, start new ones, and the numbers go back up again.”

What biologists noted though, is that for the first time bees are dying more in the summer than in the winter, when they can often face harsh weather conditions and low sources of food.

The survey found beekeepers lost 27.4 percent of their colonies this past summer. That’s up from 19.8 percent the previous summer.

Seeing massive colony losses in summer is like seeing “a higher rate of flu deaths in the summer than winter,” vanEngelsdorp said. “You just don’t expect colonies to die at this rate in the summer.”

The scientists also noted more queen bee die offs than in past occurrences.

The report fails to mention possible causes, such as glyphosate and neonicotinoids, but say that a combination of mites and poor nutrition might be to blame, with a brief mention of ‘pesticides’ without naming names.

But numerous communities, stores, and even states are not taking a chance and are standing up against neonicotinoids – the likely culprit in the massive bee deaths.

Dick Rogers, chief beekeeper for pesticide-maker Bayer, said the loss figure is “not unusual at all” and said the survey shows an end result of more colonies now than before: 2.74 million hives in 2015, up from 2.64 million in 2014.

That isn’t what many bee-keepers are saying. Colony collapse disorder is being called an international crisis. Laurence Cutts, a third generation bee keeper says:

“The hive just collapses. It will start building up in the spring then all of the sudden, the bees just disappear. There are no dead bees around the hive. You can’t do an autopsy on them to find out what killed them because they’re not there.”

With 37 million bees found dead in Canada last year, I think we’re looking at an issue here that does in fact need to be solved.

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