Bee Colony Loss - Part Two
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
US commercial beekeepers opened their hives this year to find catastrophic losses in their bee colonies. Project Apis m. was brought in to conduct a survey to assess how widespread the losses are throughout the industry.
Downey… “ Often the surveys that they take each year get 10 or 15% participation, and one striking difference with this survey is that it got almost 70% participation.”
That’s Danielle Downey, executive director of Project Apis m. She says the preliminary survey data didn’t show a simple answer.
Downey… “ Hopefully more complex information will come out of the sample analysis, which is gonna take time in the laboratories. But from what we can tell that they, the information that they gave us, we don't have a simple answer. We do know just from the survey participation because it was so high that just the reported losses from this one survey, 41% of the nation's bees have been lost. So that's a big number. It's over 1.1 million colonies. And it's gonna be really difficult to rebuild that, especially because the ones that survived are not necessarily coming through strong.”
Downey said it will likely take multiple years to rebuild the populations from this level of loss.
