Beepocalypse? No. In bee-market victory, colonies adapted to change.
You’ve heard the news about honeybees. “Beepocalypse,” they’ve called it. Beemageddon. America’s honeybees are dying, putting honey production and $15 billion worth of pollinated food crops in jeopardy.
Earlier this year, the White House even put forth the first “National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators.”
The trouble all began in 2006 or so, when beekeepers first began noticing mysterious dieoffs. It was soon christened “Colony Collapse Disorder” and has been responsible for the loss of 20 to 40 percent of managed honeybee colonies each winter over the past decade.
The math says that if you lose 30 percent of your colonies every year for a fewyears, you rapidly end up with close to zero. But the number of honeybee colonies has actually risen since 2006, from 2.4 million to 2.7 million in 2014, according to the USDA. The 2014 numbers show that the number of commercial honey-producing colonies managed by beekeepers is the highest it’s been in 20 years.
So if CCD is wiping out close to a third of all honeybee colonies a year, how are their numbers rising? One word: Beekeepers.
A 2012 working paper by Randal R. Tucker and Walter N. Thurman, a pair of agricultural economists, explains that seasonal die-offs have always been a part of beekeeping: They report that before CCD, American beekeepers would typically lose 14 percent of their colonies a year, on average.
So beekeepers have devised two ways to replenish their stock. The first involves splitting one healthy colony in two: put half the bees into a new beehive, order them a new queen online (retail price: $25 or so), and voila. Or you can buy a bunch of bees to replace the ones you lost. Three pounds of “packaged” bees, plus a queen, costs about $100.
Beekeepers have been doing this sort of thing since the advent of commercial beekeeping. The price of some of that extra work will be passed onto the consumer: The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006.
Still, it’s no “beepocalypse.” In fact, Tucker and Thurman call this a victory for the free market: “Not only was there not a failure of bee-related markets,” they conclude, “but they adapted quickly and effectively to the changes induced by the appearance of Colony Collapse Disorder.”