So does that mean those who (ahem) predicted a possible “world without bees” were wrong? Yes. Does it mean that everything’s all good with Apis mellifera, better known as the Western honeybee?
Not quite, because honeybees are still dying in massive numbers. According to the most recent survey data, beekeepers lost 48.2 percent of their managed honeybee colonies between April 2022 and April 2023, chiefly due to infestations of Varroa mites and the viruses associated with them. That’s nearly 10 percentage points higher than the previous year.
So we have a situation where there are apparently more honeybee colonies than there have ever been but honeybees are still dying by the billions from CCD and assorted other threats.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And while a small number of them today are used to produce honey, the vast majority are effectively harnessed as biological machines to support specialized agriculture.
(Another contributor, as the Post story points out, is that agriculture tax breaks make it valuable for more farmers to raise a small number of bee colonies on their land.)
And just like chickens — where H5N1 bird flu has been taking a severe toll on poultry farms — honeybees contend with diseases and parasites that feast on their weakened condition.
A lot of the coverage at the height of the beepocalypse fears — my story included — used the mass death of honeybees as a symbol of how human beings had pulled nature out of whack.
In part because oil had become so valuable, companies and governments invested in new technologies and new efforts to find unknown or previously untapped resources.
Which is why the real beepocalypse isn’t found among those millions of managed honeybee colonies, but among the thousands of wild, native bee species, nearly half of which are in some danger of extinction.
The original article contains 1,256 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
