As beekeepers across the United States of America assessed their hives in January and February for the first time in the northern hemisphere’s late-winter and early spring devastating levels of colony death became apparent. Now reported to be 62% among commercial beekeepers’ colonies, beekeepers and scientists are searching for answers while desperately trying to build back hive numbers for crucial food production.
Every year approximately two thirds of the US’s 2.7million beehives spend time in California to pollinate almond orchards in early spring, before many move off to carry out the same role in other food crops and to make their own food – honey. This year, beekeepers and growers have been left scrambling as the calendar turned to the new year and unexplained hive deaths mounted all over the vast country.
“It has been very stressful the last few months,” says Steve House, managing director of California Almond Pollination Services (CAPS) who Apiarist’s Advocate readers met in May 2024.
Large-scale, unexplained colony die off is not new to the US, with the worst case having occurred between 2006-08 when it was dubbed “colony collapse disorder” or “CCD”. However, hastily completed surveys of beekeepers, from hobbyist to large scale commercial, are showing the latest bee-killing phenomenon to be on an even larger scale.
“I have never experienced ‘CCD’ in the past, so to me this is huge and shocking!” House, who, past retirement age, has spent almost all his working life as a beekeeper.
An attempt to conceptualise the bee deaths has seen honey bee science non-profit Project Apis m. (PAM) carry out two surveys, an initial approach to beekeepers on January 28 and then a follow up on Feb 12. From the 702 survey respondents, which were estimated to represent 1.835 million of the country’s colonies, the loss rate was found to be 62% among those with 500 or more hives, 54% among ‘sideliners’ with 50-500 hives and 50% in hobbyist beekeepers’ colonies.
In response to the crisis, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) has mobilised researchers to analyse field samples collected from 114 colonies in California, including both failing and surviving colonies.
California is ground-zero for the crisis as the almond orchards bloom to welcome the new season, but beekeeper Blake Shook, who lives in Texas but has various beekeeping businesses and migratory hives, including in California, puts that into context.
“A lot of people are assuming this is a California issue. It really has nothing to do with California,” Shook says.
“These losses are nationwide, it just so happens it takes most of the country’s honey bee population to pollinate the almond crop … it is the first major event of the season, so most of us are going through our bees for the first time in California, or assessing them in other parts of the country to get them ready to send to California.”
Shook has 20 years’ experience as a commercial beekeeper and brokers hives into California’s almond orchards. Like the entire industry, he has few answers for what is clearly a wide-spread problem of bee health.
“I am getting bees from all over the country, from all different kinds of beekeeping operations, from all different skill levels, all different treatment methods, different corners of the country and I started seeing pretty fast roughly 50% loss rates on loads coming in from over-wintering sheds, or hives which had been over-wintered in California, or those coming from out of state.
“You get a truck load of bees in and half are dead or at least not up to the quality needed or we are used to seeing. This is coming from fantastic beekeepers. The best in the country … dedicated beekeepers who for 20 years have had phenomenal bees. In some cases they were seeing 80 to 90% losses. They haven’t changed their practices, they have the same treatment methods, varroa mite levels were not high, they were doing all the right things, yet seeing massive losses.”
House is fulltime on the ground in California and, like Shook, his business specialises in brokering hives into almond orchards. He has seen some large orchards flowering recently without hives placed in them.
“CAPS started out in December 2024 with over 30,000 hives available from beekeepers across the USA wanting us to contract their hives for almond pollination. In mid-January 2025 we started getting calls from our beekeepers telling us that they are having serious die offs and will not be able to provide hives this year. By the end of January we had less than 14,000 hives available for pollination,” House says.
It's a dire situation and some beekeepers are taking advantage of growers’ desperation.
“In the past two to three weeks I received calls from growers looking for well over 20,000 hives. Some did find poor quality at very high prices. Some have gone without hives this year. Unfortunately, a few greedy beekeepers took advantage of the short supply of hives and increased the price of pollination by $50 to $75 per hive over the customary rates, and using hives that would not normally make minimum grade.”
On March 1 beekeepers tuned in as PAM executive director Danielle Downey presented their survey results to a live Zoom and YouTube audience of more than 1000 interested parties between the two platforms.
“We don’t have all the answers yet, but we feel great about the team we have assembled,” Downey says of the USDA-ARS response.
The samples those scientists have taken from hives will undergo pathogen screening, testing for pesticide residues and pollen diversity, metagenomic analysis to attempt to determine previously unknown pathogens, and assessment of gut bacteria diversity.
Unhelpfully, the news of widespread honey bee colony loss comes at the same time as newly-elected president Donald Trump has made sweeping cuts to jobs at the Department of Agriculture in hopes of cost-saving.
“The consequences of these losses will take some time to understand, years,” Downey says.
The survey asked ‘Recognising this is just a guess, what factors caused your colony losses this year?’ to which ‘other’ was far away the most common response, after (in order) varroa; queen failure; weather; pesticides; disease; and starvation.
“It’s evident, bees are balancing on a razor’s edge,” Shook says.
“Bees are tough. They are made to endure weather and a rough weather event shouldn’t wipe them out. Yet it can. I think they are facing so many pressures from so many angles: pesticides, herbicides, nutrition, a lack of clean forage. There is nowhere in the country you can put bees where there aren’t already bees, because of urbanisation and monoculture farming.
“We can easily identify a dozen factors negatively impacting our bees today, so it doesn’t take much to nudge them over the edge. I think that is what we are seeing this year. Something has nudged them over the edge, but there is a litany of problems that have built them to a point of collapsing.”
From a New Zealand perspective, until any clear reason or reasons for the huge spate of hive deaths is unearthed, practical action to take to counter such a phenomenon occurring among the country’s bees cannot be known. However, author of the Colon Loss Survey among beekeepers in New Zealand, Pike Stahlmann Brown of Landcare Research points to a growing similarity in hive management between the US and New Zealand.
“As pollination becomes an increasing driver of the economics of beekeeping, there is a lot more shifting of hives,” Stahlmann-Brown says.
“We are not becoming California, or South Australia – where the migration of hives into almond orchards is huge – but with kiwifruit, cherries and avocadoes all needing hives for pollination the result is a lot of hives in close proximity and then dispersal of those hives to wider geographic areas.”
New Zealand’s geographic isolation has, thus far, seemingly been a major preventative of such colony collapse though, as Dr Richard Hall, Biosecurity New Zealand’s principal scientist for honey bee health points out.
“We have a colony loss survey that has been performed every year since 2015. Our colony loss rates are lower than many other countries and have never gone above 14% for winter colony losses in the nine years the survey has been running,” Halls says.
“The colony loss rates in other countries will be due to many factors that are independent from our own honey bee population. Our biosecurity protections for honey bees provide good protection from health issues that may affect other countries.”
All the same, we need to remain vigilant Hall says and he encourages any beekeeper who witnesses widespread colony loss or if they suspect an exotic pest or disease to call the ministry for Primary Industries hotline of 0800 80 99 66.
In the US the scramble continues though and while answers might be some time away – if ever – from coming, the impact on food production, the economy, beekeeping businesses and beekeeper wellbeing is now.
“Beekeepers are going to have a hard time recovering. This is a huge financial loss to many beekeepers, some will not survive,” House says, adding “the effects will be felt for years to come”.
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