Beekeepers nationwide sustained substantial losses last winter but managed to keep the overall colony count relatively stable by replacing lost colonies.

U.S. honeybee colonies for operations with five or more colonies totaled 2.71 million colonies on April 1, down 6.8% from 2.9 million a year earlier.

Beekeepers lost about 1.43 million colonies between April 2022 and April 2023, nearly 50% of their colonies, according to the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. They added about 1.28 million colonies during that period.

Read the reports

Colony numbers: www.nass.usda.gov

Colony losses: https://beeinformed.org

The varroa mite is consistently reported as the biggest stressor for honeybees. Other stressors include other pests and parasites, pesticides, weather, starvation, insufficient forage, queen failure, damaged or destroyed hives and diseases.

The Bee Informed Partnership, which also surveys beekeepers, reports they lost an estimated 48% of managed colonies between April 2022 and April 2023. That’s 9% higher than the year before.

That 48% national loss is the second highest loss in the Be Informed survey, and is not encouraging, said Chris Hiatt, a beekeeper and president of the American Honey Producers Association.

It led to shortages in almond pollination, he said.

Hiatt and his four brothers run beekeeping operations in Washington state, North Dakota and California, and said their losses were about even with the national average.

Most of that loss took place over the winter. The bees receive supplements as they go into the winter and queen bees are replaced.

“And we think we’re good,” he said.

Then they start going through them and find the losses, he said.

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“In the winter, they go downhill so fast,” he said.

That didn’t happen 20 or 30 years ago, he said.

“They’re fragile little suckers, not as tough as they used to be,” he said.

The bees start going downhill about July 1 and suffer big losses in December and January, he said.

While beekeepers nationwide had an average annual loss of 48%, some beekeepers in North Dakota had losses of 70% to 80%, he said. It seems like individual beekeepers suffer above-average losses every three or four years, he said.

“It doesn’t matter what you do, everybody takes their lumps,” he said.

The cause is always a mix of the three biggest stressors: varroa mites and the viruses they spread, lost forage habitat and pesticides, he said.

The American Honey Producers Association is trying to get more funding for USDA’s Agricultural Research Service to address colony losses, he said.

“It’s paramount we get some relief for all the problems we have,” he said.

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While summer losses (April-October 2022) were on par with the previous year’s losses at an estimated 24.9%, winter losses (October 2022-April 2023) were above average, according to the Bee Informed Partnership.

Winter losses were estimated at 37.4% — 13.2% higher than the previous year and 9.1% higher than the 18.2% average over the previous 15 years.

More than 60% of beekeepers reported winter losses above their acceptable threshold of around 20%.