News

Honeybee populations slightly increasing

A new report by USDA says while honeybee populations increased slightly from last year, it’s not a true reflection of colony stresses beekeepers are overcoming.

USDA statistician Joshua O’Rear says while honeybee colonies increased three percent in April compared to last year, fluctuations throughout the year are trending negative.  “That doesn’t actually measure the full magnitude of the losses because there’s also colonies added back during the year.  For instance during 2016, we kind of peaked out at 3.1 million colonies in the U.S. and then we fell all the way back down to 2.6 million colonies to start 2017.”

O’Rear says beekeepers split colonies and adjust management practices to overcome stress factors including parasites, colony collapse disorder and pesticide exposure.  “Many beekeepers will try to predict out what their losses will be and make an extra number of colonies in order to anticipate that.  We typically see the most number of colonies added between the April and June quarter.”

He says it is difficult for USDA to track what causes loses but more than half of beekeepers say varroa mites were the largest colony stressor last year.