IN YOUR ORCHARD
THE BEE BOX
2020-21 National Honey Bee Colony Loss and Management Survey Result Sneak Peek
Every year in April, the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) conducts a survey of US beekeepers to document their colony numbers and the practices they used over the past year. The survey’s primary objective is to document colony losses, management practices, and their evolution over time. The survey is the longest national effort to monitor honey bee mortality rates in the US. This year marked the 15th anniversary of the survey initiated in 2007 with the support of Apiary Inspectors of America. The plight of honey bees gained the public’s attention around 2006 when beekeepers started to report frequent unusual cases of colonies dying out. What was ultimately termed “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD) was an alarm bell that galvanized the interest
Fig. 1: Seasonal honey bee colony loss rates in the United States across years. Annual loss estimates (from one 1 April to the next 1 April) combine winter (1 October – 1 April) and summer (1 April – 1 October) losses. The loss rate was calculated as the total number of colonies lost divided by the number of colonies “at risk” during the season. Colonies at risk were composed of viable colonies and new colonies made or acquired, while excluding colonies sold or parted with. Figure credit: Bee Informed Partnership.
of the public as well as researchers. However, as with many well-named phenomena, a high degree of misinformation has surrounded CCD ever since. What became apparent in the time of CCD was the lack of baseline information on the normal level of colony mortality. This is the gap in knowledge that the Loss Survey aimed to fill, by documenting loss rates year after year. Recently released (beeinformed.org/2021/06/21/united- states-honey-bee-colony-losses-2020-2021-preliminary- results/) preliminary results from the survey show that colony losses of honey bees are still on the high end, with an estimated 43.7% turn-over of colonies between April 2020 and April 2021.
During winter alone (October 2020 to April 2021), an estimated 32.2% of managed colonies in the United States were lost (Fig. 1), which is 8.9 percentage points over what beekeepers deemed acceptable (23.3%). Over the years that BIP organized the survey, there has been no clear indication towards an improvement of the loss rates reported by US beekeepers. Not all beekeepers are affected to the same degree by colony losses. As in earlier years of the survey, backyard and sideliner beekeepers experienced a lower rate of loss during the summer when compared to the succeeding winter (27.0% vs 42.0% for backyard, and 19.5% vs 31.9% for
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