The standard practice for commercial crops is to bring in commercial hives of bees for pollination season that are shipped together via truck from crop to crop and region to region.
That sounds like a great opportunity to spread the resistant parasites from hive to hive and region to region.
drtgh · 5h ago
OffTopic: Something similar to fishing vessels,
Fishing vessels are spreading parasites at hyper-accelerated speeds. This happens when they clean the guts of infected fish at sea without prior treatment and when they discard untargeted fish in the same way; The parasites disperse exponentially, within a loop, when such parasitised food spreads through the trophic. This has already happened on a planetary level.
Also, to note, I think that if they start droping frozen guts into the sea as a treatment, our main defensive barrier at home (to froze fish some days before consumption) will eventually disappear when the parasites adapt (ie. not freezing them long enough until they die due neglect, would progressively disperse freeze-resistant strains in the wild).
ponector · 1h ago
First time I hear someone is freezing fresh fish at home. Everyone I know tries to eat fresh never-frozen fish.
I thought the main barier is to apply intense heat to the fish, not to freeze it.
Thimothy · 19m ago
In places where fish is eaten raw (or lightly pickled) you NEED to freeze it before preparing it. Anisakis is no joke.
The first time we tried to pan sear some fresh salmon was about the last time we ever tried fresh salmon. Holy crap that is an eye opener. Took a long time to get over that feeling of seeing the parasites and learning that that is basically expected in wild fish.
timr · 6h ago
Varoa mites are incredibly hard to control. Back in undergrad I worked in a fruit fly lab, and we would periodically have outbreaks, despite being about the most isolated, sterile population of insects you can imagine.
I doubt that there's any hope at all of controlling mites in free-roaming honeybees. I'd wager that we've done damage with overuse of miticides (which are insecticides, btw -- the article doesn't connect those dots) in a misguided attempt to control nature.
ne0flex · 4h ago
There's a company called, Greenlight Biosciences, that's developing an RNA-based pesticide for Varroa Mites. Last I spoke with the CEO, he mentioned positive results from trials.
That's cool, in a "better living through chemistry", 1950s man-in-a-white-labcoat sort of way. But when it comes to this stuff, I tend to be a bit like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: they're so focused on whether they could, that they never considered if they should.
Probably the better solution here is to stop trying to do industrial farming of bees, and move to a system where local populations of pollinators are cultivated and maintained year round. But sure, RNAi is probably better than the chemicals they're using now.
shellfishgene · 30m ago
> miticides (which are insecticides, btw
Mites are not insects, so miticides are not necessarily insecticides, no?
GeekyBear · 5h ago
> I doubt that there's any hope at all of controlling mites
I'm more interested in no longer spreading the mite gene(s) for pesticide immunity across the country.
timr · 5h ago
Well that’s easy: stop using miticide.
The resistance genes are not spreading due to physical transport, they’re spreading because of evolutionary selection.
GeekyBear · 5h ago
I would say that the pesticide immunity genes arise because of evolutionary selection, but once they come into existance commercial beekeeping practices quickly spread those genes from hive to hive and across the country.
timr · 3h ago
You might be right that the physical distribution plays a role, but the partial selective pressure of insecticide is like a resistance-generating machine -- as anyone who has tried to kill cockroaches will tell you.
Regardless, I think we both agree that the extremely unnatural pressures of industrial agriculture are a root
cause here.
GeekyBear · 2h ago
Certainly.
For example, Scandinavian countries that have made a concerted effort to only prescribe antibiotics to humans when they are medically necessary saw the genes for antibiotic resistance becoming less prevalent.
Unfortunately, America still allows agribusiness to feed livestock a constant stream of lower dose antibiotics, because doing so makes animals more efficient at turning feed into muscle.
cogman10 · 6h ago
Doesn't even seem like this is something that couldn't or shouldn't be region locked.
These companies are likely aren't saving more than a few percentage by centralizing and distributing.
Spivak · 6h ago
Unless we change our farming practices there isn't much else
you can do. You have acres and acres of land that are completely dead (as far as pollinators are concerned) for almost all of the year and then suddenly every plant blooms all at once and then goes away.
humblebeekeeper · 6h ago
This is what so few people realize -- farming, as it's practiced in the US, is basically mining.
It might appear to be lush nature, but the places we farm are deserts in many ways. We kill insect life, birds, mammals, and other supporting species. We remove most of nutrients from the soil and replace them chemically. A commercial orchard might as well be an Amazon datacenter from an environmental standpoint.
If we want to change things, we need to fundamentally alter the way we grow food. It will be a bit harder -- we'll need regenerative methods, less reliable methods, more human labor, more weed prone, etc. -- but we can build food production into something that's much more sustainable and ecologically sound.
Some farmers are already doing this, or experimenting with it, and I think there's at the very least a growing soil health mindset among small farmers.
anon84873628 · 5h ago
Exactly. Honeybees are a monoculture bandaid slapped on top of the monoculture farming problem, and ultimately suffer the same fate.
Many people don't realize that honeybees are not native to North America. Bringing them in massive numbers crowds out the native species and causes further ecosystem breakdown. It's good that people now understand that pollinators are important and insects need to be protected. But that means prioritizing the health of native species and creating a healthier ecosystem from the ground up (literally).
panarchy · 4h ago
I actually think this is where smaller more "organic" type robots and AI will play a role. We can do more restorative and mixed farming and then have a legion of robots doing all the picking. The way agricultural automation is currently with equidistant rows all with the same type of plant because it's basically impossible to make a machine that can take apples off a tree and pick blueberries but you can make a very optimized machine that can do either. Kind of like 10,000 cheap drones or 1 fighter jet.
nancyminusone · 6h ago
I like to bring this up in regards to livestock. "If we shouldn't eat chickens, then why are they food shaped?" Well, they are food shaped! Most of the animals we eat are designed to be eaten, born and bred over thousands of years to achieve that goal. A chicken is a most unnatural animal. No other bird has any reason to lay 300 eggs per year.
Livestock is as GMO as they come, just on a longer scale.
triceratops · 5h ago
The comment you responded to didn't say anything about GMO
datameta · 4h ago
The comment GP responded to was talking about how we have modified the environments of farms - talking about GMO livestock is a stone's toss away.
humblebeekeeper · 4h ago
FWIW, I am not opposed to GMOs broadly. But I am opposed to GMOs for the purpose of enabling more industrialization in agriculture. I don't see, e.g., red grapefruits as bad, even though they used an early form of genetic engineering (seeds were exposed to radiation in hopes of creating random mutations.)
datameta · 4h ago
I think I see your viewpoint and agree with it. It isn't a matter of "do we modify or not" but rather "how, when, and for what purpose? who benefits? does this damage the land or species lineage? etc"
sophacles · 5h ago
What a strange response to "monocropping is bad, we should probably follow the science and farm in a way that keeps pollinators around and soil healthy". They didn't say anything about not having chickens or cows.... in fact most regenerative farming practices need chickens and cows (and pigs and goats) to make the soil healthier and keep pollinators healthy.
datameta · 4h ago
This reads as a kneejerk reaction to the mention of GMO as if the person you responded to has an agenda. I think their point is that we need to be aware of what is natural (aka tested to equilibrium over huge periods of time) and what is artificial (propped up by human practices on the relatively short timescale of centuries and millenia).
It seems the baseline drifts and we could stand to take certain environmental cycles and/or livestock lifecycles for granted as though they exist purely through evolution or untouched ecological processes.
humblebeekeeper · 4h ago
FWIW, I do object to the industrial raising of animals for food as well.
Have a few pigs rummaging around your food forest? Some sheep to keep grasses and weeds in check? Some poultry to remove pests and aerate the soil? Sure! Love that, it's using behaviors in complementary ways to create a healthier system.
Cram thousands of animals into cubes and process them with machinery? Truly awful in my view.
pstuart · 6h ago
And the only way for that change to happen is to bake in monetary incentives that help drive it, whilst doing so in a political climate that is just fine with the way things are.
humblebeekeeper · 4h ago
I disagree. We can also continue to engage in revolutionary thought and practice locally. We can decide that collective and community health and wellbeing are more important than individual success. It's a more difficult road, but the capitalist mode of "just tweak the financial curves" is not the only way we can approach this problem. Just the most well supported today.
GeekyBear · 6h ago
From what I've read, the hives that are seeing these severe die offs are the commercial hives that are being shipped around.
It is possible to have local beekeepers who don't ship their hives across the country, and there are still untended wild hives. Those seem to be in better shape.
timr · 6h ago
Untended wild hives are probably also more genetically diverse, and therefore more robust to parasites and viruses.
ted_dunning · 3h ago
To be clear, the hives that are systematically reporting these severe die-offs are largely commercial hives.
There isn't a reporting structure for hobbyists. Look down-thread for an example of a hobbyist who lost their hive (and whose neighbor lost their hive).
This isn't limited to big operators.
tptacek · 3h ago
Try this: go find a place that sells honeybee nucs (a starter hive). Then go to Archive.org and compare the prices 10 years ago. I took the first "storefront" hit on Google, and found archived pages back to 2016 --- in 2016, a queen was $40; today, $42.
If it's a collapse it seems like a slow collapse.
humblebeekeeper · 6h ago
This has been the practice for more than a century. We saw the steepest declines post 2000s. While it almost certainly isn't helping, it's not the one root cause.
GeekyBear · 6h ago
The practice wouldn't be problematic until after the parasites you are shipping with the hives evolve pesticide resistance/immunity.
As soon as that gene arises, spreading it across the country becomes a bad idea.
Calwestjobs · 5h ago
hives not open whole year have no mites.
im not providing anything to anyone. i live with this statement as a fact. i will not comment anymore in this discussion. be(e) free to downvote.
humblebeekeeper · 4h ago
This is simply, objectively false.
mrweasel · 5h ago
As a Danish beekeeper: Who the hell uses a pesticide in their beehives?
I agree that keeping mites under controls is tricky at best, but I've never heard of anyone using a pesticide. Normal practise, even for commercial beekeepers is to use oxalic acid. That's not really something mites become resistant to. The other option is brood control, where you basically do a period of time with no brood, leaving the mites without the ability to reproduce. I can see the later not being tricky for commercial beekeepers as that is a lot of hives to manage. The same goes for removing drone brood during the summer, it helps a lot, but I wouldn't want to do it to hundreds of hives.
More and more I feel like the right option is the breeding of mite restistant bees, but that would entail doing nothing for a long period of time or crossing European honeybees with Asian varieties that can remote the mites themselves. The work is already being do, but it's still years away. We have found wild beehives, including abandoned beehives, which are fairly mite resistant.
drtgh · 1h ago
> We have found wild beehives, including abandoned beehives, which are fairly mite resistant.
It seems that some Apis Cerana (Japonica?) are fairly mite-resistant; they bite and kill the mites (except for those within the drone cells, as far as I read). This, could be combined also with rising the hive temperature along two hours to temperatures able to kill the mites, included the ones within the cells.
PS: I have only read a little about the matter.
ted_dunning · 3h ago
What are the bees in your hive doing when you are using this oxalic acid?
Or if you have no brood for a period of time, I can see that this would decrease the mite population in the empty hive, but wouldn't the brood carry the mites with them wherever they have gone?
(these are serious questions, not challenges)
mrweasel · 3h ago
You put the acid in the hive, in an evaporator. The air in the hive then becomes acidic enough to burn through the exoskeleton of the mites. Technically it also damages the exoskeleton of the bees, but that's thick enough that the bee doesn't notice. You normally do this over a period of 14 days in late summer, early autumn. As the other commenter points out formic acid is also an option.
For brood control, you have two options. One is to insert special frames in the hive, these are designed to encourage drone brood to go in those frames. Mites (Verrora) attack drone brood more as the cells are bigger and can better accommodate the mites. So you concentrate the mites in those frames. Then every week you remove 1/3 of those frames and discard it. That's normally enough to keep the mites at bay. The second option is to trap the queen, she stays in the hive, but she's restricted from moving around and laying eggs, i.e. you keep her away from the cells in the frames. A brood cycle is 28 days, but mites don't live that long. Without any new brood continuously cycling, they can't reproduce as they mature in the brood cells. The down side is obviously a large temporary drop in you bee population, meaning less pollination, and less honey. I don't know many who do this, but from what I'm told it is very effective. I my guess is that you probably only want to do this to fairly strong/highly populaces hives.
The acid and drone frames are normal practise, carried out by all beekeepers. Minus those who experiment with breeding mite resistant bees.
So the hive is never empty, you just create an environment that's harmful to the mites. Either by being to acidic or not providing a place for their eggs to hatch.
There are some technological ideas to help bees be healthier such as special bee hives which have more natural topology and help the bees spend less energy on cooling/heating the hive. Example for a cylindrical hive: https://www.hiive.eu/en/
drtgh · 3h ago
I searched about this and found a German beekeeper with such hives,
In [1] he can not detect the Varroa within the hive, nevertheless he notice the behavior of the hive is as if it had it. In [2] the hive is already dead, then is when he find the Varroa. In the comments on [2], one beekeeper explains that when the combs are twisted the mites fall into the combs rather than onto the floor which is traditionally used to detect them ( The sugar [3] or CO2 technique to detect Varroa in any type of hive is recommended by other beekeepers in the comments).
[3] By comments on other videos about the topic, this needs around 200 bees which are placed in a container with grids to which sugar is added. When shaken, the Verroa falls and a count can be made. The topology of this hive makes it difficult to gather this amount of bees (in the video [2] one can see that the hive would have to be dismantled).
tantalor · 6h ago
We could install HVAC in each hive.
Can heat pumps be scaled down to that size?
cogman10 · 6h ago
You don't typically have just 1 hive. It's usually a group of them.
You wouldn't need an HVAC per hive, but rather 1 HVAC for the swarm. Get a water mass, HVAC it to the right temperature, and then pump the water through the hives to maintain a good temp.
It'd be somewhat more expensive and you'd have to have enough insulation to make sure the water isn't prematurely cooling before reaching the hive.
Hives also tend to be really cheap. They are simply wood boxes. So you'd be competing with $100 wood box with $200 wood box and $1000 HVAC and plumbing.
Sometimes the old ways are best. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason, or they'd just call it the way.
Who benefits most from old methods and tech remaining a historical footnote, but the very people selling their new whiz-bang solutions for modern problems, which are themselves inherent to using their products and energy production and consumption supply chain?
sylvainkalache · 10h ago
I live in Florida. Both my neighbor and I lost our hive q few weeks apart. It happened very quickly and what the article mentioned is most likely what they got. We knew about the sharp die-off across the U.S. so decided to hold off bee keeping until it is figured out.
mistrial9 · 7h ago
there is a survey slideshow and a raw research paper linked in that article. these colony numbers are beyond awful.
foundart · 6h ago
TLDR: "According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal."
Modified3019 · 5h ago
I’m an agronomist and ~ten years ago attended an yearly industry meeting where there are various presentations that we sit in on and gain “credits” to maintain various state licenses used to legally recommend and/or apply fertilizers and pesticides.
The one presentation I recall from that far back was a bee researcher that basically said exactly what you posted, whenever his team investigated colony collapses from varroa mites (as opposed to poor treatment from being moved to California), they’d find markers for multiple previously unknown viruses. Honeybees were basically having to contend with previously isolated viruses they never evolved to resist, all at once.
I also remember the xerces society trying protest and interrupt his talk because they wanted to blame (and therefore ban) pesticides only, specifically neonicotinoids. I generally really appreciate the work they do, but in this case they really came away as being dogmatic instead of helpful.
What gets less attention though are the many dozens of native pollinator bees that also were/are hard hit and driven to full/near extinction. These species also have to contend with food source loss, because they are very selective about the flowers they will pollinate because the require a certain nutritional profile. I can’t stop viruses or varroa mites, but I can at least recommend planting wildflower mixes native to your local area.
edit Rediscovered some old blog posts I found looking into the issue at the time and found enlightening. It’s a great example of the observation work that makes a good agronomist. Bear in mind these are from 2012, so no idea if they’ve updated their thoughts to something different.
You don't need that stuff.
Oxalic acid or formic acid does the job.
arealaccount · 6h ago
I love that they attach a big $ number to the alarm in hopes that it will resonate with the powers at be.
> Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the United States, generate between $20 billion and $30 billion in agricultural revenue
lapetitejort · 5h ago
The only large number that would make the general populace care would be $30 watermelons.
> Viruses and vectors tied to honey bee colony losses
> Zachary S. Lamas, Frank Rinkevich, Andrew Garavito, Allison Shaulis, Dawn Boncristiani, Elizabeth Hill, Yan Ping Chen, Jay D. Evans
rob_c · 1h ago
A branch of US farming again reaping the rewards of non selective non food-chain-toxic (not a phrase but for simplicity sake) chemical use.
These chemicals would have lasted much longer and resistance would have been much slower in coming (if ever) if they were kept in reserve rather than used by default...
It's asif nobody learned anything from monsanto
WalterBright · 5h ago
I've let my yard grow wild, and there are a lot of flowers and a constant hum of bumblebees in the summer.
AdmiralAsshat · 7h ago
> U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter.
Christ, do we even have any bees left at this point?
milliams · 7h ago
It would need to be put in the context of what a normal annual die-off is. I expect it's not 0%, and perhaps it's normal for keepers to need to re-establish some fraction of their hives each year.
Of course, 50-60% sounds alarmingly high, but I don't know enough to be sure.
Actually, I just followed the link in the article (good job detailing their sources!) and it looks like 40% is pretty typical, but with large error bars. 62% is definitely high, but not as earth shattering as it first appears.
RangerScience · 7h ago
AFAIK, this is only commercial bees, which have a pile of stressors (such as being shipped places frequently). Non-commercial bees are doing "better" (I remember hearing that they're doing fine, but poking around now that doesn't seem to be the case).
The other issue is crop pollination, which AFAIK has heavy reliance on commercial bees.
tptacek · 5h ago
To a first approximation ~all honeybees in North America are commercial honeybees; the way it was put on EconTalk a couple years back is, "if you see a honeybee in your yard, somebody owns it."
No comments yet
maxerickson · 7h ago
Most staples wind pollinate (corn, wheat, etc). Bees are needed for a lot of fruit and nut production though.
humblebeekeeper · 7h ago
In the US, honeybees aren't native, and the bees we really need to protect are the native bees.
That said, most beekeepers expect to lose 30-50% of their hives every year. But most honeybee hives can be split into two hives every year. So if you can double (or even potentially triple, quadruple) each hive every year, a loss of 50% isn't catastrophic.
mistrial9 · 7h ago
you mean after the modern practice of truck shipping hives was commercially accepted, then "most beekeepers" expect that ??
humblebeekeeper · 6h ago
Prior to the langstroth hive, European beekeepers destroyed the hive entirely to harvest the honey. Mites and disease were less prevalent and insects were FAR less stressed by the environment.
The Langstroth hive was invented in the 1850s, and the first migratory commercial hives started in the US 50 years later.
In the 1940s we saw a steady decline in hives, but the hives really started seeing massive die offs in the 2000s.
So no, the timelines are not really due to shipping commercial hives. There's other, stronger factors at play.
No comments yet
taeric · 7h ago
Framing of this fact is one you need to be careful with. Consider that your skin is replaced every 28 days. Stated differently, you completely lose all of your skin every month or so. Of course, it is replaced as rapidly, but if you only discuss the die off...
That is, you almost certainly need to know a lot more facts about bees before knowing the die off rate is useful.
Finnucane · 5h ago
“The USDA and university labs are key components.”
Well, then, we're fucked.
westurner · 7h ago
How to plant a pollinator garden?
How to counter parasitic mites?
Aren't there new LLM applications for chemicals discovery?
> According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide — or miticide — of its kind left in humans’ arsenal
Native pollinators don't give a shit about mites. Don't spray herbicide and nature will do the rest.
westurner · 5h ago
What in nature eats the mites that are killing the bees?
franktankbank · 3h ago
Nothing needs to eat them, they just need to be manageable for the bee pops. The way that native colonies work, it just doesn't matter. The colonies size is essentially never greater than a few and often don't form colonies at all, so mites don't have really any good transmission vector.
GuinansEyebrows · 7h ago
> How to counter parasitic mites? Aren't there new LLM applications for chemicals discovery?
hard to imagine that additional hubris will solve problems created by hubris
> [FDA] will encourage researchers to use computer modeling and artificial intelligence to predict how a drug will perform, as well as organs-on-a-chip, which are miniaturized devices that mimic organs and tissues. And to determine effectiveness, the FDA will begin using existing, real-world safety data from other countries where a drug has already been studied in humans.
> FDA published a draft guidance in 2025 titled, “Considerations for the Use of Artificial Intelligence to Support Regulatory Decision Making for Drug and Biological Products.”
serguzest · 7h ago
There’s a truth we’re rarely taught in school and I find it deeply poetic:
The vivid colors we see in flowers, even those beyond our vision in the ultraviolet, and the delicate fragrances that drift on the breeze they're not for us.
They are nature’s love songs, composed to seduce insects.
All this beauty is a grand performance, meant to charm bugs into becoming messengers of life, carrying pollen from bloom to bloom.
Bees, though precious, are just one part of this ancient dance.
Moths, beetles, butterflies, each plays a role in this quiet symphony of survival.
And yet, this balance is being disrupted.
Greedy and short-sighted actions are damaging ecosystems that are far more complex than we understand.
But here’s the humbling part:
Nature will endure.
She always has.
She’ll shake us off like dust,
heal in silence,
and bloom again with or without witnesses.
esafak · 6h ago
So we're waiting for bees to evolve resistance to these mites?
svota · 6h ago
No, we're waiting for humans to die off so that bees don't live in these conditions.
Eventually something will start to eat those mites, or the commercial honeybee will go extinct. One way or another, this problem won't exist.
serguzest · 6h ago
bu yazdiklarimdan onu mu anladin aq otistigi. Hepimizi geberip gidecegiz doga devam edecek
rich_sasha · 5h ago
Can drones help?
ted_dunning · 1h ago
Not really. Once they mate and the queen is all set to produce new workers, the drones are expendable.
osigurdson · 5h ago
Anecdotally, it seems that the bee population has been increasing in the past few years - though still much lower than 20 years ago.
https://sweetharvestfoods.com/the-commercial-honey-bee-trave...
That sounds like a great opportunity to spread the resistant parasites from hive to hive and region to region.
Fishing vessels are spreading parasites at hyper-accelerated speeds. This happens when they clean the guts of infected fish at sea without prior treatment and when they discard untargeted fish in the same way; The parasites disperse exponentially, within a loop, when such parasitised food spreads through the trophic. This has already happened on a planetary level.
Also, to note, I think that if they start droping frozen guts into the sea as a treatment, our main defensive barrier at home (to froze fish some days before consumption) will eventually disappear when the parasites adapt (ie. not freezing them long enough until they die due neglect, would progressively disperse freeze-resistant strains in the wild).
I thought the main barier is to apply intense heat to the fish, not to freeze it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisakis
I doubt that there's any hope at all of controlling mites in free-roaming honeybees. I'd wager that we've done damage with overuse of miticides (which are insecticides, btw -- the article doesn't connect those dots) in a misguided attempt to control nature.
https://www.greenlightbiosciences.com/in-the-pipeline-protec...
Probably the better solution here is to stop trying to do industrial farming of bees, and move to a system where local populations of pollinators are cultivated and maintained year round. But sure, RNAi is probably better than the chemicals they're using now.
I'm more interested in no longer spreading the mite gene(s) for pesticide immunity across the country.
The resistance genes are not spreading due to physical transport, they’re spreading because of evolutionary selection.
Regardless, I think we both agree that the extremely unnatural pressures of industrial agriculture are a root cause here.
For example, Scandinavian countries that have made a concerted effort to only prescribe antibiotics to humans when they are medically necessary saw the genes for antibiotic resistance becoming less prevalent.
Unfortunately, America still allows agribusiness to feed livestock a constant stream of lower dose antibiotics, because doing so makes animals more efficient at turning feed into muscle.
These companies are likely aren't saving more than a few percentage by centralizing and distributing.
It might appear to be lush nature, but the places we farm are deserts in many ways. We kill insect life, birds, mammals, and other supporting species. We remove most of nutrients from the soil and replace them chemically. A commercial orchard might as well be an Amazon datacenter from an environmental standpoint.
If we want to change things, we need to fundamentally alter the way we grow food. It will be a bit harder -- we'll need regenerative methods, less reliable methods, more human labor, more weed prone, etc. -- but we can build food production into something that's much more sustainable and ecologically sound.
Some farmers are already doing this, or experimenting with it, and I think there's at the very least a growing soil health mindset among small farmers.
Many people don't realize that honeybees are not native to North America. Bringing them in massive numbers crowds out the native species and causes further ecosystem breakdown. It's good that people now understand that pollinators are important and insects need to be protected. But that means prioritizing the health of native species and creating a healthier ecosystem from the ground up (literally).
Livestock is as GMO as they come, just on a longer scale.
It seems the baseline drifts and we could stand to take certain environmental cycles and/or livestock lifecycles for granted as though they exist purely through evolution or untouched ecological processes.
Have a few pigs rummaging around your food forest? Some sheep to keep grasses and weeds in check? Some poultry to remove pests and aerate the soil? Sure! Love that, it's using behaviors in complementary ways to create a healthier system.
Cram thousands of animals into cubes and process them with machinery? Truly awful in my view.
It is possible to have local beekeepers who don't ship their hives across the country, and there are still untended wild hives. Those seem to be in better shape.
There isn't a reporting structure for hobbyists. Look down-thread for an example of a hobbyist who lost their hive (and whose neighbor lost their hive).
This isn't limited to big operators.
If it's a collapse it seems like a slow collapse.
As soon as that gene arises, spreading it across the country becomes a bad idea.
im not providing anything to anyone. i live with this statement as a fact. i will not comment anymore in this discussion. be(e) free to downvote.
I agree that keeping mites under controls is tricky at best, but I've never heard of anyone using a pesticide. Normal practise, even for commercial beekeepers is to use oxalic acid. That's not really something mites become resistant to. The other option is brood control, where you basically do a period of time with no brood, leaving the mites without the ability to reproduce. I can see the later not being tricky for commercial beekeepers as that is a lot of hives to manage. The same goes for removing drone brood during the summer, it helps a lot, but I wouldn't want to do it to hundreds of hives.
More and more I feel like the right option is the breeding of mite restistant bees, but that would entail doing nothing for a long period of time or crossing European honeybees with Asian varieties that can remote the mites themselves. The work is already being do, but it's still years away. We have found wild beehives, including abandoned beehives, which are fairly mite resistant.
It seems that some Apis Cerana (Japonica?) are fairly mite-resistant; they bite and kill the mites (except for those within the drone cells, as far as I read). This, could be combined also with rising the hive temperature along two hours to temperatures able to kill the mites, included the ones within the cells.
PS: I have only read a little about the matter.
Or if you have no brood for a period of time, I can see that this would decrease the mite population in the empty hive, but wouldn't the brood carry the mites with them wherever they have gone?
(these are serious questions, not challenges)
For brood control, you have two options. One is to insert special frames in the hive, these are designed to encourage drone brood to go in those frames. Mites (Verrora) attack drone brood more as the cells are bigger and can better accommodate the mites. So you concentrate the mites in those frames. Then every week you remove 1/3 of those frames and discard it. That's normally enough to keep the mites at bay. The second option is to trap the queen, she stays in the hive, but she's restricted from moving around and laying eggs, i.e. you keep her away from the cells in the frames. A brood cycle is 28 days, but mites don't live that long. Without any new brood continuously cycling, they can't reproduce as they mature in the brood cells. The down side is obviously a large temporary drop in you bee population, meaning less pollination, and less honey. I don't know many who do this, but from what I'm told it is very effective. I my guess is that you probably only want to do this to fairly strong/highly populaces hives.
The acid and drone frames are normal practise, carried out by all beekeepers. Minus those who experiment with breeding mite resistant bees.
So the hive is never empty, you just create an environment that's harmful to the mites. Either by being to acidic or not providing a place for their eggs to hatch.
In [1] he can not detect the Varroa within the hive, nevertheless he notice the behavior of the hive is as if it had it. In [2] the hive is already dead, then is when he find the Varroa. In the comments on [2], one beekeeper explains that when the combs are twisted the mites fall into the combs rather than onto the floor which is traditionally used to detect them ( The sugar [3] or CO2 technique to detect Varroa in any type of hive is recommended by other beekeepers in the comments).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYKL7hrp23k HIIVE Confusion
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsdHyRdpfB0 All the bees dead - why Varroa was so treacherous here
[3] By comments on other videos about the topic, this needs around 200 bees which are placed in a container with grids to which sugar is added. When shaken, the Verroa falls and a count can be made. The topology of this hive makes it difficult to gather this amount of bees (in the video [2] one can see that the hive would have to be dismantled).
Can heat pumps be scaled down to that size?
You wouldn't need an HVAC per hive, but rather 1 HVAC for the swarm. Get a water mass, HVAC it to the right temperature, and then pump the water through the hives to maintain a good temp.
It'd be somewhat more expensive and you'd have to have enough insulation to make sure the water isn't prematurely cooling before reaching the hive.
Hives also tend to be really cheap. They are simply wood boxes. So you'd be competing with $100 wood box with $200 wood box and $1000 HVAC and plumbing.
IIRC they are _massively_ less efficient. Relevant Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnMRePtHMZY
kiss
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher
Perforated Double Skinned Exterior
Lots of cool tech from the past
Who benefits most from old methods and tech remaining a historical footnote, but the very people selling their new whiz-bang solutions for modern problems, which are themselves inherent to using their products and energy production and consumption supply chain?
The one presentation I recall from that far back was a bee researcher that basically said exactly what you posted, whenever his team investigated colony collapses from varroa mites (as opposed to poor treatment from being moved to California), they’d find markers for multiple previously unknown viruses. Honeybees were basically having to contend with previously isolated viruses they never evolved to resist, all at once.
I also remember the xerces society trying protest and interrupt his talk because they wanted to blame (and therefore ban) pesticides only, specifically neonicotinoids. I generally really appreciate the work they do, but in this case they really came away as being dogmatic instead of helpful.
What gets less attention though are the many dozens of native pollinator bees that also were/are hard hit and driven to full/near extinction. These species also have to contend with food source loss, because they are very selective about the flowers they will pollinate because the require a certain nutritional profile. I can’t stop viruses or varroa mites, but I can at least recommend planting wildflower mixes native to your local area.
edit Rediscovered some old blog posts I found looking into the issue at the time and found enlightening. It’s a great example of the observation work that makes a good agronomist. Bear in mind these are from 2012, so no idea if they’ve updated their thoughts to something different.
https://scientificbeekeeping.com/the-extinction-of-the-honey...
https://scientificbeekeeping.com/neonicotinoids-trying-to-ma...
> Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the United States, generate between $20 billion and $30 billion in agricultural revenue
> Viruses and vectors tied to honey bee colony losses
> Zachary S. Lamas, Frank Rinkevich, Andrew Garavito, Allison Shaulis, Dawn Boncristiani, Elizabeth Hill, Yan Ping Chen, Jay D. Evans
These chemicals would have lasted much longer and resistance would have been much slower in coming (if ever) if they were kept in reserve rather than used by default...
It's asif nobody learned anything from monsanto
Christ, do we even have any bees left at this point?
Of course, 50-60% sounds alarmingly high, but I don't know enough to be sure.
Actually, I just followed the link in the article (good job detailing their sources!) and it looks like 40% is pretty typical, but with large error bars. 62% is definitely high, but not as earth shattering as it first appears.
The other issue is crop pollination, which AFAIK has heavy reliance on commercial bees.
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That said, most beekeepers expect to lose 30-50% of their hives every year. But most honeybee hives can be split into two hives every year. So if you can double (or even potentially triple, quadruple) each hive every year, a loss of 50% isn't catastrophic.
The Langstroth hive was invented in the 1850s, and the first migratory commercial hives started in the US 50 years later.
In the 1940s we saw a steady decline in hives, but the hives really started seeing massive die offs in the 2000s.
So no, the timelines are not really due to shipping commercial hives. There's other, stronger factors at play.
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That is, you almost certainly need to know a lot more facts about bees before knowing the die off rate is useful.
Well, then, we're fucked.
How to counter parasitic mites? Aren't there new LLM applications for chemicals discovery?
> According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide — or miticide — of its kind left in humans’ arsenal
"Viruses and vectors tied to honey bee colony losses" (2025) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706v1....
hard to imagine that additional hubris will solve problems created by hubris
> [FDA] will encourage researchers to use computer modeling and artificial intelligence to predict how a drug will perform, as well as organs-on-a-chip, which are miniaturized devices that mimic organs and tissues. And to determine effectiveness, the FDA will begin using existing, real-world safety data from other countries where a drug has already been studied in humans.
Also from 2025: "FDA to Use A.I. In Drug Approvals to 'Radically Increase Efficiency'" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44252183
(Edit)
From FDA > "Artificial Intelligence for Drug Development" https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res... :
> FDA published a draft guidance in 2025 titled, “Considerations for the Use of Artificial Intelligence to Support Regulatory Decision Making for Drug and Biological Products.”
They are nature’s love songs, composed to seduce insects. All this beauty is a grand performance, meant to charm bugs into becoming messengers of life, carrying pollen from bloom to bloom.
Bees, though precious, are just one part of this ancient dance. Moths, beetles, butterflies, each plays a role in this quiet symphony of survival.
And yet, this balance is being disrupted. Greedy and short-sighted actions are damaging ecosystems that are far more complex than we understand.
But here’s the humbling part: Nature will endure. She always has. She’ll shake us off like dust, heal in silence, and bloom again with or without witnesses.