Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off

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.

Untended wild hives are probably also more genetically diverse, and therefore more robust to parasites and viruses.

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.

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.

It is important to remember that the hives out in the woods are not wild but cast-off swarms of domesticated honey bees, and that the mating behavior of honey bees will fold in genetics from many hives in a region ( drone congregation areas represent feral and backyard and commercial hives in a rather vast area ).

The genetic research seems to point to the opposite happening - that because of pressures on honey bees from pesticides or pests ( and thereby viral pressure carried by various pests ) the feral and commercial populations track quite closely.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8991 - there's a lot here specifically relevant to this discussion but especially note the emergence of African Honey Bee genotype in wild populations. This paper is from 2015 analyzing the biodiversity response to the arrival of V. destructor ( varroa mites ) and Africanized bees were introduced in the early 1990s as well.

The take-away is that until you have a 3 mile separation of water, assume that populations of bees in a land area are more related than not and face similar pressures in a given climate, whether feral or managed. Honey Bees especially ( but of course every living thing ) should be managed with an ecosystem mindset.

Project Apis m. ( data source cited in the article [0] ) is not limited to commercial beekeepers, but many backyard keepers are not plugged in to the research on either end. I responded to the survey as a backyard keeper with 4 surviving hives.

[0] https://www.projectapism.org/colony-loss-information

A few things:

a) African honey bees aren't domesticated populations, challenging your overall point.

b) A 3 mile separation is not substantial (though I grant you that if most of the bees in any given cluster are introduced, then it might lead to more homogeneity).

c) even within "wild" populations of whatever, you see local clusters of genetic similarity. It's been a while since I took population genetics, but IIRC this kind of local equilibrium was well-covered.

Also, I haven't read the paper, but the abstract sure sounds like what I'm describing -- a sudden population bottleneck leads to rapid evolutionary adaptation in wild populations:

"These findings suggest that genetically diverse honey bee populations can recover from introduced diseases by evolving rapid tolerance, while maintaining much of the standing genetic variation."