{"id":31814,"date":"2025-07-15T09:00:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-15T09:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=31814"},"modified":"2025-07-15T09:25:01","modified_gmt":"2025-07-15T09:25:01","slug":"amid-devastating-winter-losses-another-threat-looms-for-u-s-beekeepers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=31814","title":{"rendered":"Amid Devastating Winter Losses, Another Threat Looms For U.S. Beekeepers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Every January, Charles Linder travels from Illinois to Idaho to retrieve thousands of bee hives from a temperature-controlled storage facility. He loads boxes of hives onto a semi truck headed west for almond season, the first of many stops his bees will make on a cross-country pollination tour.<\/p>\n

But two winters ago, Mr. Linder opened those boxes and discovered that around 90 percent of his bees were dead. \u201cIt was gut-wrenching,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s an emotional loss from that. There\u2019s a frustration that you didn\u2019t do your job right. And then the economics hit.\u201d<\/p>\n

His experience was not unique. The western honeybee, Apis mellifera, is the workhorse of American agriculture, pollinating more than 130 types of nuts, fruits and vegetables \u2014 some $15 billion worth of the nation\u2019s crops \u2014 every year. But as the commercial beekeeping industry in the United States has grown, so too have its losses. Nearly 56 percent of managed honeybee colonies died off in the past year, according to preliminary results<\/a> released in June by the U.S. Beekeeping Survey. That is the highest rate recorded since annual reporting began in 2011.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeekeepers, especially commercial ones, experienced a particularly bad year,\u201d Geoff Williams, an entomologist at Auburn University who coordinated the survey, wrote in an email. The results, he said, highlight \u201cthe tremendous strain honeybees and beekeepers are facing to safeguard our food supply.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Honeybee health has been negatively affected by a combination of factors<\/a>: unpredictable weather, habitat loss, pesticides and disease. But one of the biggest threats is a parasite known as varroa destructor, a Southeast Asian mite that arrived in the United States in the late 1980s. In June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced<\/a> that viruses spread by varroa were a leading cause of the past year\u2019s colony collapses, with an estimated financial impact of $600 million for beekeeping businesses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Sammy Ramsey, an entomologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who has spent years sounding the alarm about Tropilaelaps mites. \u201cWe already have a perfect storm of problematic issues for our bees,\u201d he said.<\/span>Sirachai Arunrugstichai\/Ramsey Research Foundation<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Every January, Charles Linder travels from Illinois to Idaho to retrieve thousands of bee hives from a temperature-controlled storage facility. He loads boxes of hives onto a semi truck headed west for almond season, the first of many stops his bees will make on a cross-country pollination tour.But two winters ago, Mr. Linder opened those boxes and discovered that around 90 percent of his bees were dead. \u201cIt was gut-wrenching,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s an emotional loss from that. There\u2019s a frustration that you didn\u2019t do your job right. And then the economics hit.\u201dHis experience was not unique. The western honeybee, Apis mellifera, is the workhorse of American agriculture, pollinating more than 130 types of nuts, fruits and vegetables \u2014 some $15 billion worth of the nation\u2019s crops \u2014 every year. But as the commercial beekeeping industry in the United States has grown, so too have its losses. Nearly 56 percent of managed honeybee colonies died off in the past year, according to preliminary results released in June by the U.S. Beekeeping Survey. That is the highest rate recorded since annual reporting began in 2011.\u201cBeekeepers, especially commercial ones, experienced a particularly bad year,\u201d Geoff Williams, an entomologist at Auburn University who coordinated the survey, wrote in an email. The results, he said, highlight \u201cthe tremendous strain honeybees and beekeepers are facing to safeguard our food supply.\u201dHoneybee health has been negatively affected by a combination of factors: unpredictable weather, habitat loss, pesticides and disease. But one of the biggest threats is a parasite known as varroa destructor, a Southeast Asian mite that arrived in the United States in the late 1980s. In June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that viruses spread by varroa were a leading cause of the past year\u2019s colony collapses, with an estimated financial impact of $600 million for beekeeping businesses.Sammy Ramsey, an entomologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who has spent years sounding the alarm about Tropilaelaps mites. \u201cWe already have a perfect storm of problematic issues for our bees,\u201d he said.Sirachai Arunrugstichai\/Ramsey Research FoundationWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31816,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31814"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31817,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31814\/revisions\/31817"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}