> 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
> As soon as scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught wind of the record-breaking die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs by President Donald Trump’s administration. Now, 6 months later, USDA scientists have finally identified a culprit.
Bees are an important pollinator. Bees die = we starve. Thanks, Trump.
The ultimate solution to this problem will be going back to a suite of native pollinators rather than depending on non-native honeybees.
Potatoes and sweet potatoes are tubers. I started growing this year and learned a lot about it just from my backyard. No pollination
For example cucumbers not staple nor are peppers. Cucumbers need a bee or insect to pollinate unless the type that doesn’t. But they are low in calories so not staple and more perishable
"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."
This is to be expected, eventually evolution will produce a small amount of a species that is resistant to a chemical, then those will likely be hyper successful at breeding. Honeybees are not native to the Americas, it seems like we've imported a major feast for these mites. Perhaps there's another organism that preys on these mites. Nature often provides the a cure with the poison.
[0] - https://choosenatives.org/articles/native-bees-need-buzz/
Trump and the enabling Republican congress are the ones gutting NSF+ NIH funding to universities and emptying the national labs. Those are the scientific problem solvers consumers and farmers are paying taxes to solve this kind of thing. When even Republican-friendly Stanford has layoffs...
Sure, instead give tax cuts to the wealthy and send a 10X bigger budget to ICE to deport farmhands, and let basic food, medicine, weather, etc infrastructure whither. It's not a big mystery why scientists are having to hold out their hand and ask to not be laid off in every media mention like this.
And yes, if you think the scientists self-reporting on their funding cuts are fake, the objective truth problem is most definitely you.
> We found compelling evidence that honey bee introductions indirectly decrease pollination by reducing nectar and pollen availability and competitively excluding visits from more effective native bees. In contrast, the direct impact of honey bee visits on pollination was negligible, and, if anything, negative. Honey bees were ineffective pollinators, and increasing visit quantity could not compensate for inferior visit quality.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy....
Also:
> Feral bee colonies usually just die after 18-24 months. That's long enough to swarm repeatedly, so mite pressure isn't really a threat to honeybees as a species in the wild. They live long enough to reproduce and almost nobody tries to harvest honey from them for sale. There's basically no chance that mites will make feral honeybees go extinct. Rather, mite parasitism's an economic problem that threatens commercial beekeeping [...]. Keeping bees alive with both mites and pesticides, especially in the face of climate change, is really hard if you need to make money doing it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Beekeeping/comments/10jtmgk/wild_be...
Christ, do we even have any bees left at this point?
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.
The other issue is crop pollination, which AFAIK has heavy reliance on commercial 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.
The Langstroth hive was invented in the 1850s, and the first migratory commercial hives started in the US 50 years later.
In the 1940s we saw a steady decline in hives, but the hives really started seeing massive die offs in the 2000s.
So no, the timelines are not really due to shipping commercial hives. There's other, stronger factors at play.
That is, you almost certainly need to know a lot more facts about bees before knowing the die off rate is useful.
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....
hard to imagine that additional hubris will solve problems created by hubris
Can heat pumps be scaled down to that size?
kiss
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.
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.
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.
These companies are likely aren't saving more than a few percentage by centralizing and distributing.
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.
Livestock is as GMO as they come, just on a longer scale.
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.
As soon as that gene arises, spreading it across the country becomes a bad idea.
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.
Looks like the administration is speedrunning an attempt to top the ecological destruction from Mao's foolish Four Pests campaign.
Private foundations can pay for some of it - a lot of the green revolution was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation - but they don't have the resources of the federal government, and you're relying on the whim of a single family or individual.
Government-funded basic research has worked out really well for the US.
I understand why Science engages in activism like this, but sometimes they take it too far. Because the reality is that it’s not a matter of “bee research or no bee research”, it’s a matter of cutting this or cutting something else with the marginal dollar. It's not even clear from the article what kind of cuts were made to the program. The only mention of budget at all is a brief, unexplained sentence at the top of the article:
> As soon as scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught wind of the record-breaking die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs by President Donald Trump’s administration.
My guess is that the third-party organization (Project Apis m.) gets a grant from the USDA. But they probably also get funding from the industry, because this is an important part of industrial agriculture. It's the sort of lazy drop-in that you could do in literally any article involving a government-funded organization.
> 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
sylvainkalache•4h ago
mistrial9•1h ago