The U.S. beekeeping industry is in crisis over the shocking and unexplained deaths of hundreds of millions of bees over the last eight months.
It’s an unfolding disaster for the industry. Blake Shook, one of the nation’s top beekeepers, has found tens of thousands of dead insects at his businesses. He said that he’s never seen losses like this.
“The data is showing us this is the worst bee loss in recorded history,” Shook told CBS Saturday Morning.
Researchers are struggling to understand what’s causing the deaths.
Juliana Rangel, an entomologist at Texas A&M University, has been studying bee hives in her lab. There are a few potential explanations, she said, including changing habitats and weather patterns. But there’s no certain answer, she said.
Bees play a critical role in U.S. food production. In addition to making honey, they pollinate 75% of the fruits, nuts and vegetables grown in the U.S. That’s $15 billion worth of crops. Shook said the current losses are unsustainable.
“If this is a multi-year thing, it’ll change the way we consume food in the United States,” Shook said. “If we lose 80% of our bees every year, the industry cannot survive, which means we cannot pollinate at the scale that we need to produce food in the United States.”
One example is almonds. With honeybees pollinating them, almond trees produce two to three thousand pounds of almonds per acre, Shook said. Without that pollination, almond trees produce only 200 pounds of nuts per acre.
“There is no almond crop without honeybees,” Shook said.
One of Shook’s businesses focuses on rebuilding dead hives. He’s receiving an alarming number of those hives, he said, from commercial operations across the country. Beekeeping groups say 25% of those commercial operations may be put out of business by year’s end because of the losses.
“I got a call from a friend who had 20,000 beehives at the start of the winter, and he’s at less than 1,000. He said ‘This is it, I’m done.’ I’ve had far too many of those calls in the last few weeks,” Shook said. “It’s not just a beekeeper issue. This is a national food security issue.”
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