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The bees keep dying:
Beekeepers across the United States lost more than 40 percent of their honey bee colonies during the year spanning April 2014 to April 2015, according to the latest results of an annual nationwide survey. While winter loss rates improved slightly compared to last year, summer losses--and consequently, total annual losses--were more severe. Commercial beekeepers were hit particularly hard by the high rate of summer losses, which outstripped winter losses for the first time in five years, stoking concerns over the long-term trend of poor health in honey bee colonies.
The survey, which asks both commercial and small-scale beekeepers to track the health and survival rates of their honey bee colonies, is conducted each year by the Bee Informed Partnership in collaboration with the Apiary Inspectors of America, with funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A summary of the 2014-2015 results is available upon request prior to May 13, 2015; thereafter the results will be added to previous years' results publicly available on the Bee Informed website.
Of course, thanks to the good Doctor we know bees are actually disappearing in anticipation of the Earth being stolen from space by Davros.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday May 15 2015, @01:06PM
Dead on. From what I've read, and also saw on a lengthy documentary some months ago, these are the two big problems. In order to get the passivity of honey bees, so that they are easier to keep, they have been pretty massively inbred. What a surprise: inbreeding causes problems.
The whole industry of trucking bees around from one field to another: If you had to design a way to spread disease fast, that's the kind of thing you might come up with. Monoculture bees fertilizing monoculture agriculture: truly, a perfect match.
Those horrible "killer bees" coming into the US from Mexico? That's just the behavior of wild bees. They apparently make honey just fine, but they disagree with people taking it away. Not being inbred, they are also much more resistant to all the diseases that plague the domestic bees.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.