In just one year, local beekeeper and Trinity parent Denise Brady harvested 100 pounds of honey from her three hives. But this year, she’s down to barely 25. A combination of aggressive pests, erratic weather and shifting seasonal patterns has devastated her bee colonies, and hers are far from the only ones.
This is not just another quirky “Florida nature event;” this is a glimpse into the worldwide decline of honeybee populations, a trend that soon may cross the point of no return.
The jobs of Western European honeybees can be seen in almost every facet of day-to-day life, serving as a metric for global environmental health and prosperity.
“(Bees) are responsible for 80% of global food and crop pollination, so a third of the food that we eat every single day,” said Aakash Manaswi, a sophomore at Lake Highland who conducts award-winning bee research. “They’re really the most important asset to humanity, and if we were to lose them … it would destroy the global food economy.”
Unfortunately, recent statistics paint a bleak picture for the future of bees, as the issues they face only continue to accelerate.
“Beekeepers lose about 40% to 50% of their hives every single year, and this year it’s actually expected to reach 70% colony losses,” Manaswi said.
The biggest threat attributed to colony loss is the varroa mite. This parasite feeds on the fat bodies of adult bees and developing honeybee larvae, acting as a vector for up to 20 different viruses within hives.
A U.S. Department of Agriculture report from June finds that over 60% of commercial beekeeping colonies had been lost since the prior summer, representing 1.7 million colonies and an estimated financial impact of $600 million from varroa mites alone.
But varroa mites are just one piece to a much larger crisis that beekeepers face. Climate change, habitat destruction and soil degradation are all pivotal factors in the decline of bee populations.
“Extreme weather changes affect the flowering times, and that’s what I saw this spring the most,” Brady said. “Farming losses are another big issue that we’re having that reduces the pollen sources, which reduces the nutrition to the bees.”
While honeybees are key to honey production, they also regulate local grocery market prices. They do this through facilitating natural crop production from pollination, which is necessary to keep import costs down and have greater food availability.
“Immediately we’d see a lot less honey produced … then we would eventually see just less natural food sources available (globally),” Manaswi said. “All these crops will become more expensive and will be a lot harder to get ahold of.”
Although the long-term ramifications of a declining honeybee population have yet to be fully realized, local agricultural sectors are feeling the impact.
“One of the major orange producers was based near the Orlando area, and they had to shut down because there were lots of pests and the orange trees weren’t getting pollinated enough,” Manaswi said. “This means … there’s going to be a lot less availability (for oranges), and they’re going to be a lot more expensive.”
Crucially, however, these problems compound on themselves, making the loss of bee colonies worse over time. That means any meaningful solution must address the entire system, not just one cause, which is easier said than done.
“It’s not just one thing that’s causing a loss of the species, but it’s the overwhelming magnitude of all those things added together,” biology teacher Emily Massey-Burmeister said. “Habitat fragmentation is taking away their food sources and their ability to be able to find mates, then climate change will likely further reduce the size of the population.”
While these major problems require large, coordinated solutions, that starts with local advocacy from the ground up, which is essential to inspire broader change and push larger systems to take notice.
Supporting local beekeepers through buying their products, for example, offers benefits beyond just a higher-quality good; it also provides the financial support needed to combat rising costs for materials, which is key to maintaining bee colony infrastructure.
“(Beekeepers have) to pay a lot of overhead for a lot of (supplies) that are being shipped and being brought into the United States,” Brady said. “So many different things that the beekeepers use are going up in prices, and that’s impacting them a lot.”
Beyond helping the people behind the honey, there is a growing need to advocate for the bees themselves.
“The best ways (to advocate for honeybees) are to support nonprofits and researchers who are getting involved in this cause,” Manaswi said. “Some people could even get involved in the research itself, and others could support these people. They could repost it, share it and reach out to their local district representatives to get involved or ask them to help in anyway possible.”
Manaswi’s own research led him to create an innovative pest repellent, which involves releasing carbon dioxide into an infested hive and only killing the varroa mites while leaving the bees unharmed.
In the meantime, there is still a lot of work to do, because as things are looking now, the trajectory of honeybee populations is only going to continue buzzing downward.
There’s a lot that needs to continue to go in the upward trends,” Brady said. “Beekeeping has gotten better, people are more aware, they’re doing things to protect bees and they’re handling bees better. But if the climate, weather, farming, all of those things don’t cooperate, then there will not be (enough) progress, because (without) nature … there won’t be bees.”
