California honeybees are still declining, Trump administration says it can’t afford to study it
WASHINGTON – It’s the last federal report on honeybee populations we’ll see – at least for a while – and the numbers for California show the number of colonies are still decreasing.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in July that it would no longer be funding a nationwide annual survey of the honeybee population, citing a need for cost cuts. The survey was started under the administration of former President Barack Obama in 2015.
“The decision to suspend data collection was not made lightly but was necessary given available fiscal and program resources,” the USDA said in a notice on its website, though officials have not said how much the survey costs.
The data cover colonies lost, new colonies and renovated colonies, with some states adding and renovating more colonies than those that are lost.
Pollinators like bees are under threat because of parasites, pesticide use, destruction of habitat and the climate crisis.
The latest results, which cover up to April 1, show a slight decrease in the honeybee population, both in California and nationwide. In California, there were 30,000 fewer honeybee colonies between Jan. 1, 2017 and Jan. 1, 2019, a loss of about 2.6 percent of the state’s honeybee colony population.
Previous surveys showed a loss of 19 percent of honeybee colonies in California between 2015 and 2017, about 270,000 colonies lost. Nationwide, the decrease was smaller, with honeybee colonies during that time decreasing from about 2.8 million to 2.6 million.
California particularly needs honeybees for pollinating crops such as almonds, apples, avocados and grapes.
Honeybees have had to be shipped into California to help with almond pollination particularly. Gordon Frankie, who researches bees for the University of California, Berkeley Essig Museum of Entomology, said the loss of the survey is “horrible.”
“There’s always a cry for more, longterm research but it’s hard to get things funded past three years,” Frankie said. “Cutting back on anything that has to do with pollination is just a disaster.”
Without long-term research, Frankie said, it’s hard to say what the trends are and what particularly contributes to losses in population. And while there are private studies of honeybee populations, long-term funding is never guaranteed. And mortality rates on honeybees have increased, he warned, currently at 40 percent – up from a more typical 25 percent.
“If you cut the funding back you just don’t really know how those bees are doing,” Frankie said.