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Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off
- jimt1234 1y agoSorta related: If you're ever in Hawaii/Big Island, I highly recommend this place for the tour or just dropping by to taste some honey: https://bigislandbees.com https://bigislandbees.com
- BlackFly 1y agoYeah, science.org is editorializing. The actual investigators say > While viruses are a likely end-stage cause of colony death, other stressors such as nutritional stress and agrochemicals may have also played significant roles. because their study just cannot tease apart the origin cause due to selection bias in the methodology. That isn't the point of their study. Their hypothesis was that miticide resistant varroa were killing (possibly already compromised) bees due to novel viruses and pathogens. Thus the use of current miticides won't help colony collapse.
- bubbajones 1y ago[dead]
- sylvainkalache 1y agoI live in Florida. Both my neighbor and I lost our hive q few weeks apart. It happened very quickly and what the article mentioned is most likely what they got. We knew about the sharp die-off across the U.S. so decided to hold off bee keeping until it is figured out.
- mistrial9 1y agothere is a survey slideshow and a raw research paper linked in that article. these colony numbers are beyond awful.
- mitchbob 1y agohttps://archive.ph/tGxRx https://archive.ph/tGxRx
- aspenmayer 1y agohttps://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706v1 ( https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706 ) > 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
- inetknght 1y ago[flagged]
- pfdietz 1y agoAll the major staple crops are wind pollinated, not insect pollinated. The ultimate solution to this problem will be going back to a suite of native pollinators rather than depending on non-native honeybees.
- asmodeuslucifer 1y ago[flagged]
- contravariant 1y agoI don't mind using AI to help gather information but did you even read this?
- jawilson2 1y agoI just logged on for the first time in months to downvote this too. If HN is going to be full of threads of people reposting AI garbage slop I will quickly find somewhere else to...do whatever it is I do here. Keep your AI bullshit to yourself, I do not trust a word of ANY of it.
- snarf21 1y agoWhile fruits, vegetables and nuts can be pollinated by wind, that won't work at the scale and yields that our aggro-industrial complex needs. If it weren't required, almond growers wouldn't pay to have millions of hives transported to California each year to pollinate their trees.
- pfdietz 1y agoI said staple crops (which is relevant when someone is claiming that "bees die" implies "we all starve"). It would be very sad to not have insect pollinated crops, but it wouldn't be an existential disaster.
- AdmiralAsshat 1y ago> U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter. Christ, do we even have any bees left at this point?
- milliams 1y agoIt would need to be put in the context of what a normal annual die-off is. I expect it's not 0%, and perhaps it's normal for keepers to need to re-establish some fraction of their hives each year. 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.
- RangerScience 1y agoAFAIK, this is only commercial bees, which have a pile of stressors (such as being shipped places frequently). Non-commercial bees are doing "better" (I remember hearing that they're doing fine, but poking around now that doesn't seem to be the case). The other issue is crop pollination, which AFAIK has heavy reliance on commercial bees.
- maxerickson 1y agoMost staples wind pollinate (corn, wheat, etc). Bees are needed for a lot of fruit and nut production though.
- tptacek 1y agoTo a first approximation ~all honeybees in North America are commercial honeybees; the way it was put on EconTalk a couple years back is, "if you see a honeybee in your yard, somebody owns it."
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
- smackay 1y ago[flagged]
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoPlease don't copy / paste AI summaries, if I wanted Google search results I'd use Google myself. It's like posting the passive-aggressive lmgtfy.com link. Thanks for disclosing your comment is AI generated at least.
- westurner 1y agoHow to plant a pollinator garden? 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.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706v1....
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago> How to counter parasitic mites? Aren't there new LLM applications for chemicals discovery? hard to imagine that additional hubris will solve problems created by hubris
- westurner 1y ago"Chemical knowledge and reasoning of large language models vs. chemist expertise" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44275471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44275471
- westurner 1y agoFrom (2025) https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2025/04/11/fda-animals-dogs-primates-pharma-biotech-medicines-research-development/ https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2025/04/11/fda-animals-do... : > [FDA] will encourage researchers to use computer modeling and artificial intelligence to predict how a drug will perform, as well as organs-on-a-chip, which are miniaturized devices that mimic organs and tissues. And to determine effectiveness, the FDA will begin using existing, real-world safety data from other countries where a drug has already been studied in humans. Also from 2025: "FDA to Use A.I. In Drug Approvals to 'Radically Increase Efficiency'" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44252183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44252183 (Edit) From FDA > "Artificial Intelligence for Drug Development" https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-research-cder/artificial-intelligence-drug-development https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res... : > FDA published a draft guidance in 2025 titled, “Considerations for the Use of Artificial Intelligence to Support Regulatory Decision Making for Drug and Biological Products.”
- oezi 1y agoThere are some technological ideas to help bees be healthier such as special bee hives which have more natural topology and help the bees spend less energy on cooling/heating the hive. Example for a cylindrical hive: https://www.hiive.eu/en/ https://www.hiive.eu/en/
- tantalor 1y agoWe could install HVAC in each hive. Can heat pumps be scaled down to that size?
- newsclues 1y agothere are simple, no power, designs that have existed for a long time that would be a better way to go. kiss
- aspenmayer 1y agoI'm thinking something like a wind-powered rotating attic fan.
- newsclues 1y agoNo power and no moving parts are good design goals. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher Perforated Double Skinned Exterior Lots of cool tech from the past
- aspenmayer 1y agoSometimes the old ways are best. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason, or they'd just call it the way. Who benefits most from old methods and tech remaining a historical footnote, but the very people selling their new whiz-bang solutions for modern problems, which are themselves inherent to using their products and energy production and consumption supply chain?
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- serguzest 1y agoThere’s a truth we’re rarely taught in school and I find it deeply poetic: The vivid colors we see in flowers, even those beyond our vision in the ultraviolet, and the delicate fragrances that drift on the breeze they're not for us. 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.
- esafak 1y agoSo we're waiting for bees to evolve resistance to these mites?
- serguzest 1y agobu yazdiklarimdan onu mu anladin aq otistigi. Hepimizi geberip gidecegiz doga devam edecek
- svota 1y agoNo, we're waiting for humans to die off so that bees don't live in these conditions. Eventually something will start to eat those mites, or the commercial honeybee will go extinct. One way or another, this problem won't exist.
- GeekyBear 1y agoThe standard practice for commercial crops is to bring in commercial hives of bees for pollination season that are shipped together via truck from crop to crop and region to region. https://sweetharvestfoods.com/the-commercial-honey-bee-travel-route/ 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.
- cogman10 1y agoDoesn't even seem like this is something that couldn't or shouldn't be region locked. These companies are likely aren't saving more than a few percentage by centralizing and distributing.
- Spivak 1y agoUnless we change our farming practices there isn't much else you can do. You have acres and acres of land that are completely dead (as far as pollinators are concerned) for almost all of the year and then suddenly every plant blooms all at once and then goes away.
- humblebeekeeper 1y agoThis is what so few people realize -- farming, as it's practiced in the US, is basically mining. 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.
- pstuart 1y ago
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago[flagged]
- lokar 1y ago[flagged]
- declan_roberts 1y agoHow did we get to the point that everything relies on this discretionary funding? We have some serious design flaws.
- analog31 1y agoIt wasn't all that discretionary so long as the ruling faction was executing laws in good faith.
- apical_dendrite 1y agoBecause there are some things that the market just won't do effectively. Basic science that takes decades to pay off is a good example. Somebody has to understand the biology so that decades later someone else can build a product. 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.
- EasyMark 1y ago[flagged]
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- timr 1y agoAnd yet, if you read between the lines, the funding cut had next to no impact on what is reported here. The third-party organization still did the work, it's not stated how the work was slowed (if at all), and the case that speeding it up would have affected the outcome is pretty weak -- remember, they’re doing a retrospective on something that has already happened, and the article points out repeatedly that they have no effective tools on the mites. 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.
- foundart 1y agoTLDR: "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."
- Modified3019 1y agoI’m an agronomist and ~ten years ago attended an yearly industry meeting where there are various presentations that we sit in on and gain “credits” to maintain various state licenses used to legally recommend and/or apply fertilizers and pesticides. The one presentation I recall from that far back was a bee researcher that basically said exactly what you posted, whenever his team investigated colony collapses from varroa mites (as opposed to poor treatment from being moved to California), they’d find markers for multiple previously unknown viruses. Honeybees were basically having to contend with previously isolated viruses they never evolved to resist, all at once. I also remember the xerces society trying protest and interrupt his talk because they wanted to blame (and therefore ban) pesticides only, specifically neonicotinoids. I generally really appreciate the work they do, but in this case they really came away as being dogmatic instead of helpful. What gets less attention though are the many dozens of native pollinator bees that also were/are hard hit and driven to full/near extinction. These species also have to contend with food source loss, because they are very selective about the flowers they will pollinate because the require a certain nutritional profile. I can’t stop viruses or varroa mites, but I can at least recommend planting wildflower mixes native to your local area. edit Rediscovered some old blog posts I found looking into the issue at the time and found enlightening. It’s a great example of the observation work that makes a good agronomist. Bear in mind these are from 2012, so no idea if they’ve updated their thoughts to something different. https://scientificbeekeeping.com/the-extinction-of-the-honey-bee/ https://scientificbeekeeping.com/the-extinction-of-the-honey... https://scientificbeekeeping.com/neonicotinoids-trying-to-make-sense-of-the-science-part-2/ https://scientificbeekeeping.com/neonicotinoids-trying-to-ma...
- spookie 1y agoYou don't need that stuff. Oxalic acid or formic acid does the job.
- arealaccount 1y agoI love that they attach a big $ number to the alarm in hopes that it will resonate with the powers at be. > 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
- lapetitejort 1y agoThe only large number that would make the general populace care would be $30 watermelons.
- osigurdson 1y agoAnecdotally, it seems that the bee population has been increasing in the past few years - though still much lower than 20 years ago.
- Finnucane 1y ago“The USDA and university labs are key components.” Well, then, we're fucked.
- rich_sasha 1y agoCan drones help?
- ted_dunning 1y agoNot really. Once they mate and the queen is all set to produce new workers, the drones are expendable.
- WalterBright 1y agoI've let my yard grow wild, and there are a lot of flowers and a constant hum of bumblebees in the summer.
- mrweasel 1y agoAs a Danish beekeeper: Who the hell uses a pesticide in their beehives? I agree that keeping mites under controls is tricky at best, but I've never heard of anyone using a pesticide. Normal practise, even for commercial beekeepers is to use oxalic acid. That's not really something mites become resistant to. The other option is brood control, where you basically do a period of time with no brood, leaving the mites without the ability to reproduce. I can see the later not being tricky for commercial beekeepers as that is a lot of hives to manage. The same goes for removing drone brood during the summer, it helps a lot, but I wouldn't want to do it to hundreds of hives. More and more I feel like the right option is the breeding of mite restistant bees, but that would entail doing nothing for a long period of time or crossing European honeybees with Asian varieties that can remote the mites themselves. The work is already being do, but it's still years away. We have found wild beehives, including abandoned beehives, which are fairly mite resistant.
- spookie 1y agoYou can use formic acid too
- ted_dunning 1y agoWhat are the bees in your hive doing when you are using this oxalic acid? Or if you have no brood for a period of time, I can see that this would decrease the mite population in the empty hive, but wouldn't the brood carry the mites with them wherever they have gone? (these are serious questions, not challenges)
- mrweasel 1y agoYou put the acid in the hive, in an evaporator. The air in the hive then becomes acidic enough to burn through the exoskeleton of the mites. Technically it also damages the exoskeleton of the bees, but that's thick enough that the bee doesn't notice. You normally do this over a period of 14 days in late summer, early autumn. As the other commenter points out formic acid is also an option. For brood control, you have two options. One is to insert special frames in the hive, these are designed to encourage drone brood to go in those frames. Mites (Verrora) attack drone brood more as the cells are bigger and can better accommodate the mites. So you concentrate the mites in those frames. Then every week you remove 1/3 of those frames and discard it. That's normally enough to keep the mites at bay. The second option is to trap the queen, she stays in the hive, but she's restricted from moving around and laying eggs, i.e. you keep her away from the cells in the frames. A brood cycle is 28 days, but mites don't live that long. Without any new brood continuously cycling, they can't reproduce as they mature in the brood cells. The down side is obviously a large temporary drop in you bee population, meaning less pollination, and less honey. I don't know many who do this, but from what I'm told it is very effective. I my guess is that you probably only want to do this to fairly strong/highly populaces hives. The acid and drone frames are normal practise, carried out by all beekeepers. Minus those who experiment with breeding mite resistant bees. So the hive is never empty, you just create an environment that's harmful to the mites. Either by being to acidic or not providing a place for their eggs to hatch.
- climatenufties 1y ago[flagged]
- rob_c 1y agoA branch of US farming again reaping the rewards of non selective non food-chain-toxic (not a phrase but for simplicity sake) chemical use. These chemicals would have lasted much longer and resistance would have been much slower in coming (if ever) if they were kept in reserve rather than used by default... It's asif nobody learned anything from monsanto
- paul_h 1y agoFrom a few weeks ago - https://civileats.com/2025/06/11/honey-bees-learn-to-fight-deadly-varroa-mites https://civileats.com/2025/06/11/honey-bees-learn-to-fight-d....