Bees in the U.S. are in decline and scientists are trying to establish why.
The honeybee has seen a dramatic decrease in numbers according to the Bee Informed Partnership who is made up of bee researchers from all over the county. The surveys conducted involved 5,700 beekeepers from 48 states that showed a whopping 44 percent loss in bee colonies over the past year and beekeepers are getting worried.
Bees are more essential to our economy than you may imagine with almost a third of the food we eat in some way contributed by the effort of bees according to Tech Insider, including our well-loved coffee. The White House reported that bees add $15 billion to the U.S. economy annually making them an essential economic provider.
The bee survey project director, Dennis VanEngelsdorp of the University of Maryland, was perplexed at their decline – not just in the winter months as expected – but also in summer when a boom in bees usually takes place.
“We usually think of this as a very good time for bees,” VanEngelsdorp stated. “When we first started this 10 years ago, we didn’t even monitor summer losses because we didn’t think this would be significant.”
Although not clear, experts are pointing the finger of blame towards multiple factors including the use of pesticides, diseases and environmental factors. It is also thought private beekeepers don’t have proper varroa (the parasite associated with bees) protection strategies in place and could be causing spread to other bee colonies.
The bee decline is worrying but bee researchers are trying their best to start protecting honeybees numbers from dwindling even further and hopefully get to the main cause of their decreased population. However, they need to get the annual colony losses down to around 18 percent before they are able to manage the potential problems properly.