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Matt Mulica, Honey Bee Health Coalition
For at least 3,000 years, humans have taken on the responsibility of ensuring honey bees have adequate food in exchange for honey and pollination. Especially in recent decades, humans have relied on honey bees to pollinate crops to feed the growing world, including the fruits, vegetables, and nuts that are among the most nutritious parts of our diets. All told, honey bees support about $18B a year in produce.
Today, commercially managed honey bees and their keepers travel the country for about 6 months of the year to pollinate crops – from California almonds to Maine blueberries. Although roughly 4,000 species of wild bees live in the United States, managed honey bees are uniquely capable of filling this pollination need. Between these relatively short pollination events, the bees keep living, which means they need to keep feeding. For bees, one of the best natural defenses against stress and disease, such as those brought on by Varroa mites, is a rich, diverse diet of pollen and nectar. They must have access to flowers blooming across the landscape throughout the year.
While managed honey bees are excellent at fulfilling our needs, it has become increasingly difficult to fulfill theirs. Flowers have been harder to find as towns and cities grow, agricultural land management intensifies, and areas are paved or planted with grasses that do not provide nectar.
Surveys indicate that domestic honey bee losses in 2025 averaged over 60%, the largest Winter die-off since the term Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) was first coined in 2006.
This depressingly large body count is just the latest tally of a long, grim, nearly 20-year war of attrition, pitting beekeepers against the many stressors that undermine the health of their livestock. It is a conflict that once again demands our attention if we value the integrity of our natural and working landscapes, the survival of multiple industries, and the availability of affordable and nutritious food to eat.
After an initial spike of interest in 2006, public attention to bees has remained lower than interest in other environmental issues. Even so, efforts to improve bee health have continued steadily behind the scenes. For over two decades, the USDA, academic institutions, nonprofits, beekeepers, and agricultural companies have worked together through groups like the Honey Bee Health Coalition and Project Apis m. Their research has revealed several interconnected factors that weaken bee hives, including poor nutrition, pathogens, pesticides, and environmental stressors.
Despite these ongoing efforts and their resulting breakthroughs, annual honey bee losses have remained unsustainable and are increasing throughout North America. When USDA released its first analysis of the causes of last year’s die-off, it revealed a new potent combination of familiar ills: enemy number one, the parasitic mite Varroa destructor, and the complex of viruses that comes with it. Preliminary tests indicate Varroa has become increasingly resistant to some of the most economical preventative treatments, making it more costly to tackle and complicating an already hard fight. And, not all mites were shown to have the resistant genetics, further complicating the puzzle.
Wild Bees & Managed Bees Interaction
Public lands permits for placing honey bee hives have become increasingly restrictive, quoting singular studies that indicate that honey bees outcompete wild bees. A recent analysis of 68 studies found negative effects on wild bees from the placement of honey bee hives in only two cases and positive effects in ten. Most studies showed no effect at all. Yet there persists this narrative that honey bees are harming wild bee populations. Leading bee experts have become especially inflamed with this cherry-picking of studies. Interactions between bees are very context-specific. An isolated island off the coast of Italy, the setting for one recently quoted study, is very different from tracts on expansive national forest land that have been under grazing or timber management for decades, which is more typical for the placement of hives domestically.
It’s incredibly important to conserve intact native ecosystems with locally specific flowering plants and the bees that depend on them, including rare and sensitive species. Honey bee needs for diverse forage, however, can often be met with relatively inexpensive pollinator seed mixes planted in landscapes that have already been managed or changed by humans.
Honey bees still need our help. We need policies that promote pollinator-friendly plantings on agricultural land and public land under active management. Public land managers need to understand and acknowledge that interspecies bee competition is highly dependent on past and present land management, climate, the species that are present, and many other factors that are best discovered in a detailed site assessment. The impact of sheep grazing for example has a much higher impact on wild bee population than managed bees ever could. As members of the public that these agencies serve, you can elevate these messages, forwarding them to the local offices that manage the lands near you.
Ultimately, we need all the bees. We need them to support highly biodiverse ecosystems, and we need them to be the pollination air force that gives us almonds, apples, blueberries, oilseeds and honey, among many other staples. For centuries, honey bees have fed us, and now we need to feed them.
Matthew Mulica is the facilitator of the Honey Bee Health Coalition, a Keystone Policy Center collaborative effort that works to achieve healthy populations of honey bees and other pollinators in the context of productive agriculture and thriving ecosystems. Visit https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/ to learn more.
From Editor
The Honey Bee Health Coalition (HBHC) has contributed so much in various connecting and engaging outreach ways to our Honey Bee world for years. But are you/us/we aware and grateful for their efforts?
To learn more and donate, visit https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/
– Jerry Hayes