Nearly half of US honeybee colonies died last year. Struggling beekeepers stabilize population
Nearly half of US honeybee colonies died last year. Struggling beekeepers stabilize population
A new survey says America's honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies. But using costly measures to create new colonies, beekeepers are somehow keeping afloat. Thursday’s University of Maryland and Aubu...
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The USA can take this large losses, they have relative few hives and can easily import bees if needed.
IIRC there are 2 million hives in the USA with 100 Million managed hives world wide. A lot of the 2 million hives in the USA are managed by big commercial beekeepers (1000+ hives) and I doubt a lot of them take the survey. While I've heard about higher winter losses from commercial beekeepers I doubt they are this high.
I work with/for a european commercial beekeeper and we had low winter losses ~3%. While the hobby beekepers had a record high loss according to the national survey ~30%.
Isn't the high death rate an indicator of problems with the general insect population? While bees are important pollinators, so are wasps, flys, butterflys and many more, that cannot rely on active measures to recover.