Why the death of the honeybee was greatly exaggerated

Honeybees are too valuable to go extinct. Not every species will be so fortunate.

One consequence of being a journalist since, oh, the 20th century, is that you accumulate a track record.

In the hundreds and hundreds of stories I’ve published over the last 25 years, some look eerily prescient (like this cover story from 2017 warning about a coming pandemic). Some are weird. (Did I really write a story in 2007 about bars in Tokyo where men dress up as English butlers to entertain female customers? Apparently.)

And then there are the stories that maybe haven’t aged all that well. Case in point: In 2013, I wrote a feature for Time magazine with the cover line: “A world without bees.”

The gist of it is that colony collapse disorder (CCD) — a still not fully understood syndrome that began killing honeybee colonies in large numbers beginning around the mid-2000s — was in danger of wiping out honeybees altogether in the US. And that in turn would mean catastrophe for the many crops that depend on honeybee pollination.

An advantage (or drawback) of being in journalism this long is that the predictions you made, say, 11 years ago, have time to play out. And as you may have noticed on your last visit to the supermarket, our agricultural system hasn’t collapsed.

Almonds — which are so dependent on commercial honeybee pollination that something like 42 billion bees are used during almond trees’ spring growing season — have seen their acreage more than double since 2007, when CCD was first identified. If honeybees were truly dying out, you wouldn’t see almond milk everywhere.

As the Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam wrote in a delightful column last week, the US may actually have more honeybees now than it ever has before. Data from the US Department of Agriculture’s extremely detailed Census of Agriculture indicates that there were, quite precisely, 3,800,015 honeybee colonies in the US in 2022.

That’s a startling 31 percent increase from 2007, and a larger increase than any other domesticated animals. Even chickens, which usually top these sorts of data tables.

So does that mean those who (ahem) predicted a possible “world without bees” were wrong? Yes. Does it mean that everything’s all good with Apis mellifera, better known as the Western honeybee?

Not quite, because honeybees are still dying in massive numbers. According to the most recent survey data, beekeepers lost 48.2 percent of their managed honeybee colonies between April 2022 and April 2023, chiefly due to infestations of Varroa mites and the viruses associated with them. That’s nearly 10 percentage points higher than the previous year.

So we have a situation where there are apparently more honeybee colonies than there have ever been but honeybees are still dying by the billions from CCD and assorted other threats. What gives?

A lot of the confusion, it turns out, stems from the difference between how we think about honeybees and how we actually use them.

Honeybees aren’t what you think

There’s a reason the USDA is in charge of counting up how many honeybee colonies there are in the US, and not, say, the Interior Department or the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s because honeybees aren’t a wild species — they’re essentially a farmed one.

Honeybees aren’t even native to North America — they’re colonists of a kind, first brought here by European settlers in the 17th century. And while a small number of them today are used to produce honey, the vast majority are effectively harnessed as biological machines to support specialized agriculture.

Consider the great spring almond pollination. Some 80 percent of the world’s almond supply comes from California’s Central Valley with trees that need honeybees for pollination. So every spring, beekeepers from around the US bring their colonies to California to carry out that lucrative pollination. And it’s lucrative: About $4 of every $5 spent on what the USDA calls “bee fertility assistance” goes to support the almond crop.

That, in part, is why bee colony numbers have kept growing even as the toll from CCD and other threats to honeybees have continued to mount. Simply put, honeybees are so valuable that even as they continue to die in large numbers, it’s economically viable to keep replacing them. (Another contributor, as the Post story points out, is that agriculture tax breaks make it valuable for more farmers to raise a small number of bee colonies on their land.)

Rather than thinking of honeybees as a species in peril like the red wolf or the right whale, a better analogy is to factory-farmed chickens. Like chickens, honeybees are stressed to the killing point by the conditions of mass farming (in the bees’ case, the stress of being moved across the country to service California almond trees). And just like chickens — where H5N1 bird flu has been taking a severe toll on poultry farms — honeybees contend with diseases and parasites that feast on their weakened condition.

Yet both chickens and honeybees are so valuable that it’s in farmers’ economic interest to more than replace what they lose, with the result that numbers keep going up. Which is not the same thing as saying that honeybees are doing all right.

“You wouldn’t be like, ‘Hey, birds are doing great. We’ve got a huge biomass of chickens!” Eliza Grames, a biologist at Binghamton University, told the Post. “It’s kind of the same thing with honeybees.”

Bees are what they’re worth

A lot of the coverage at the height of the beepocalypse fears — my story included — used the mass death of honeybees as a symbol of how human beings had pulled nature out of whack. But it’s not, mostly because there is nothing natural about the way we’ve used honeybees over the past few decades, just as there is nothing natural about a factory farming system that raises and kills nearly 10 billion chickens each year.

Capitalism, as it turns out, is really, really good at finding solutions to scarcity when enough money is on the line. The mid-2000s moment that CCD was first entering the public consciousness also marked the height of fears around “peak oil”: the idea that the world had entered a terminal decline in oil production, with cataclysmic results for the global economy. And there was reason to believe this was true: On January 2, 2008, oil hit $100 a barrel for the first time, while US oil production had been declining for decades.

Capitalism, though, finds a way. In part because oil had become so valuable, companies and governments invested in new technologies and new efforts to find unknown or previously untapped resources. Cut to today, when the world is producing more oil than it did during the peak days of “peak oil” and the US has become the single largest oil producer ever.

So we have honeybees and we have oil because that’s what the market demands. But the market doesn’t care about the condition of those billions of hard-working bees any more than it cares about the climate consequences of keeping the oil taps flowing, because it ultimately doesn’t care about that which cannot be priced. Unless we require it to.

Which is why the real beepocalypse isn’t found among those millions of managed honeybee colonies, but among the thousands of wild, native bee species, nearly half of which are in some danger of extinction. No commercial beekeepers are coming to their rescue.

We won’t have a world without honeybees anytime soon, but we may be headed toward a world where they are the only bees.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!