USDA study:­­ Survey shows 8% loss in honey bee colonies

-- Photo courtesy of lovelygreens.com/2012/05/mid-may-hive-check.html

Gazette intern reporter

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agriculture Statistics Service (NASS) released the results of its first ever Honey Bee Colony Loss survey on Thursday, May 12. The survey studied more than 20,000 honey beekeepers regarding colonies lost, stayed, added and affected by particular stressors.

Results from the survey are expected to provide baseline information on honey bee losses as well as help with bee management decisions. They will also help USDA and other federal departments and agencies create a more unified approach to implementing the national strategy, which was unveiled in 2015.

“Pollinators are essential to the production of food, and in the United States, honey bees pollinate an estimated $15 billion of crops each year, ranging from almonds to zucchinis,” said Dr. Ann Bartuska, USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics. “This new data will add to USDA's robust scientific body of knowledge on the inventory, movement and death loss of honey bees in the United States.”

The survey showed there were 2.59 million or eight percent fewer honey bee colonies on Jan. 1, 2016, than the 2.82 million present a year earlier for operations with five or more colonies.

This new quarterly colony data allows new levels of analysis.

Additionally, there was an 18 percent loss of colonies in the January-March quarter in 2015 and a 17 percent loss in the same quarter of 2016.

Honey beekeepers with five colonies or more reported Varroa mites to be the leading stressor affecting colonies.

The National Strategy, developed under the leadership of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA and USDA), created three overarching goals to reduce honey bee colony losses to economically sustainable levels, increase monarch butterfly numbers to protect the annual migration and restore or enhance millions of acres of land for pollinators through combined public and private action, the press release stated.

This research goes hand-in-hand with other information USDA and partners have been collecting for years. The data being released by NASS allows the efforts to provide a baseline federal statistical resource to track change of reported numbers and death loss in colonies that are managed by small hobbyists to the largest commercial producers, according to the report.