NBC News, by Matt Lavietes: Honeybee colonies in the United States are projected to decline by up to 70% in 2025, entomologists at Washington State University said Tuesday.
The university said in a news release that in the past decade, honeybee colony losses have averaged 40% to 50% annually. But this year, a combination of nutrition deficiencies, mite infestations, viral diseases and possible pesticide exposure during the previous pollinating season led to higher losses, the release said.
“Losses have been increasing steadily,” Priya Chakrabarti Basu, an assistant professor of pollinator health and apiculture at WSU, said in the news release. “Pollination demands haven’t gone down, so beekeepers face tremendous pressure to keep the same number of colonies to meet those needs.”
The implications could be huge.
About 35% of the world’s food depends on pollinators, according to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Brandon Hopkins, a professor of pollinator ecology at WSU, said in a statement accompanying the release that higher losses could also lead to higher costs for farmers who depend on bee colonies.
“I don’t want to be a fear-monger, but this level of national loss could mean increased bankruptcies amongst beekeepers,” Hopkins said. “Growers of crops downstream from almonds may need to scramble if the beekeeper they’ve relied on to pollinate their apple trees, for example, isn’t in business anymore.”
Honeybees had a production value of nearly $350 million in 2023, according to the Agriculture Department.
Hopkins added that the extreme honeybee colonies also put the almond industry at particular risk this year.
“The almond industry frequently asks for strong colonies. But this year, growers are desperate,” Hopkins said. “Anything with live bees in a box is in demand because the industry is short on supply.”
“I haven’t heard of that since the early days of colony collapse around 2008,” he added.
Prophetic Link:
“While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal all their maladies, he will bring disease and disaster, until populous cities are reduced to ruin and desolation. Even now he is at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by land, in great conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms, in tempests, floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, in every place and in a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous. Destruction will be upon both man and beast. “The earth mourneth and fadeth away,” “the haughty people … do languish. The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.” Isaiah 24:4, 5.” Great Controversy, page 589.3.
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