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The standard practice for commercial crops is to bring in commercial hives of bees for pollination season that are shipped together via truck from crop to crop and region to region.

https://sweetharvestfoods.com/the-commercial-honey-bee-trave...

That sounds like a great opportunity to spread the resistant parasites from hive to hive and region to region.

How to plant a pollinator garden?

How to counter parasitic mites? Aren't there new LLM applications for chemicals discovery?

> According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide — or miticide — of its kind left in humans’ arsenal

"Viruses and vectors tied to honey bee colony losses" (2025) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706v1....

TLDR: "According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal."

I love that they attach a big $ number to the alarm in hopes that it will resonate with the powers at be.

> Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the United States, generate between $20 billion and $30 billion in agricultural revenue

There are some technological ideas to help bees be healthier such as special bee hives which have more natural topology and help the bees spend less energy on cooling/heating the hive. Example for a cylindrical hive: https://www.hiive.eu/en/

From a few weeks ago - https://civileats.com/2025/06/11/honey-bees-learn-to-fight-d....

As a Danish beekeeper: Who the hell uses a pesticide in their beehives?

I agree that keeping mites under controls is tricky at best, but I've never heard of anyone using a pesticide. Normal practise, even for commercial beekeepers is to use oxalic acid. That's not really something mites become resistant to. The other option is brood control, where you basically do a period of time with no brood, leaving the mites without the ability to reproduce. I can see the later not being tricky for commercial beekeepers as that is a lot of hives to manage. The same goes for removing drone brood during the summer, it helps a lot, but I wouldn't want to do it to hundreds of hives.

More and more I feel like the right option is the breeding of mite restistant bees, but that would entail doing nothing for a long period of time or crossing European honeybees with Asian varieties that can remote the mites themselves. The work is already being do, but it's still years away. We have found wild beehives, including abandoned beehives, which are fairly mite resistant.

I live in Florida. Both my neighbor and I lost our hive q few weeks apart. It happened very quickly and what the article mentioned is most likely what they got. We knew about the sharp die-off across the U.S. so decided to hold off bee keeping until it is figured out.

Can drones help?

Sorta related: If you're ever in Hawaii/Big Island, I highly recommend this place for the tour or just dropping by to taste some honey: https://bigislandbees.com

“The USDA and university labs are key components.”

Well, then, we're fucked.

> U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter.

Christ, do we even have any bees left at this point?

A branch of US farming again reaping the rewards of non selective non food-chain-toxic (not a phrase but for simplicity sake) chemical use.

These chemicals would have lasted much longer and resistance would have been much slower in coming (if ever) if they were kept in reserve rather than used by default...

It's asif nobody learned anything from monsanto

I've let my yard grow wild, and there are a lot of flowers and a constant hum of bumblebees in the summer.

Yeah, science.org is editorializing. The actual investigators say

> While viruses are a likely end-stage cause of colony death, other stressors such as nutritional stress and agrochemicals may have also played significant roles.

because their study just cannot tease apart the origin cause due to selection bias in the methodology. That isn't the point of their study. Their hypothesis was that miticide resistant varroa were killing (possibly already compromised) bees due to novel viruses and pathogens. Thus the use of current miticides won't help colony collapse.

Anecdotally, it seems that the bee population has been increasing in the past few years - though still much lower than 20 years ago.

There’s a truth we’re rarely taught in school and I find it deeply poetic: The vivid colors we see in flowers, even those beyond our vision in the ultraviolet, and the delicate fragrances that drift on the breeze they're not for us.

They are nature’s love songs, composed to seduce insects. All this beauty is a grand performance, meant to charm bugs into becoming messengers of life, carrying pollen from bloom to bloom.

Bees, though precious, are just one part of this ancient dance. Moths, beetles, butterflies, each plays a role in this quiet symphony of survival.

And yet, this balance is being disrupted. Greedy and short-sighted actions are damaging ecosystems that are far more complex than we understand.

But here’s the humbling part: Nature will endure. She always has. She’ll shake us off like dust, heal in silence, and bloom again with or without witnesses.