Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-identify-culprit-behind-biggest-ever-u-s-honeybee-die

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

186 100 1 year ago

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.

mistrial92• 1 year ago

there is a survey slideshow and a raw research paper linked in that article. these colony numbers are beyond awful.

mitchbob• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/tGxRx

aspenmayer3• 1 year ago

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

AdmiralAsshat• 1 year ago

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?

milliams• 1 year ago

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.

RangerScience• 1 year ago

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.

maxerickson• 1 year ago

Most staples wind pollinate (corn, wheat, etc). Bees are needed for a lot of fruit and nut production though.

tptacek2• 1 year ago

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."

humblebeekeeper8• 1 year ago

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.

mistrial92• 1 year ago

you mean after the modern practice of truck shipping hives was commercially accepted, then "most beekeepers" expect that ??

taeric2• 1 year ago

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.

westurner5• 1 year ago

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....

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

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

westurner5• 1 year ago

"Chemical knowledge and reasoning of large language models vs. chemist expertise" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44275471

franktankbank2• 1 year ago

Native pollinators don't give a shit about mites. Don't spray herbicide and nature will do the rest.

westurner5• 1 year ago

What in nature eats the mites that are killing the bees?

oezi• 1 year ago

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/

tantalor• 1 year ago

We could install HVAC in each hive.

Can heat pumps be scaled down to that size?

colanderman• 1 year ago

Peltier heat pumps, though less efficient than other types, can be made very small and have no moving parts.

newsclues2• 1 year ago

there are simple, no power, designs that have existed for a long time that would be a better way to go.

kiss

cogman102• 1 year ago

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.

waffletower• 1 year ago

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

drtgh3• 1 year ago

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).

serguzest2• 1 year ago

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.

esafak• 1 year ago

So we're waiting for bees to evolve resistance to these mites?

serguzest2• 1 year ago

bu yazdiklarimdan onu mu anladin aq otistigi. Hepimizi geberip gidecegiz doga devam edecek

svota• 1 year ago

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.

GeekyBear6• 1 year ago

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.

cogman102• 1 year ago

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.

Spivak• 1 year ago

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.

humblebeekeeper8• 1 year ago

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.

GeekyBear6• 1 year ago

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.

humblebeekeeper8• 1 year ago

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.

GeekyBear6• 1 year ago

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.

Calwestjobs• 1 year ago

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.

timr7• 1 year ago

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.

GeekyBear6• 1 year ago

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.

ne0flex• 1 year ago

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...

shellfishgene• 1 year ago

miticides (which are insecticides, btw Mites are not insects, so miticides are not necessarily insecticides, no?

drtgh3• 1 year ago

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).

ponector• 1 year ago

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.

foundart• 1 year ago

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."

Modified3019• 1 year ago

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...

spookie2• 1 year ago

You don't need that stuff. Oxalic acid or formic acid does the job.

arealaccount• 1 year ago

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

lapetitejort• 1 year ago

The only large number that would make the general populace care would be $30 watermelons.

osigurdson• 1 year ago

Anecdotally, it seems that the bee population has been increasing in the past few years - though still much lower than 20 years ago.

Finnucane• 1 year ago

“The USDA and university labs are key components.”

Well, then, we're fucked.

rich_sasha• 1 year ago

Can drones help?

ted_dunning4• 1 year ago

Not really. Once they mate and the queen is all set to produce new workers, the drones are expendable.

WalterBright• 1 year ago

I've let my yard grow wild, and there are a lot of flowers and a constant hum of bumblebees in the summer.

mrweasel2• 1 year ago

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.

spookie2• 1 year ago

You can use formic acid too

ted_dunning4• 1 year ago

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)

mrweasel2• 1 year ago

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.

drtgh3• 1 year ago

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.

rob_c• 1 year ago

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

paul_h• 1 year ago

From a few weeks ago - https://civileats.com/2025/06/11/honey-bees-learn-to-fight-d....

jimt1234• 1 year ago

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

BlackFly• 1 year ago

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.

Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off

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