Why the honeybee ‘apocalypse’ is a big lie
Americans were sold a lie about the death of the honeybee, whose numbers are actually thriving
AARON Dodds, 36, started his first honeybee colony back in 2018. For just a few hundred dollars, he got 30,000 bees for the backyard garden he shares with his wife in New Hagerstown, Ohio. They were inspired, Dodds says, by their mutual concern for “the plight of pollinators.”
Honeybees are hugely important to the food chain, pollinating a third of what we eat, like coffee, potatoes, and a majority of fruits and vegetables. Dodds, who works as a projects manager at the Jefferson Soil and Water Conservation District, said he’s helping to “bring back a species to these areas that, from an insect perspective, are blighted and desolate.”
Like Dodds, hundreds of thousands of Americans have recently taken on beekeeping as a hobby — and as a means of saving the world. Many are spurred on by celebrities creating the “buzz.” Beyoncé, in the cover story of this month’s Harper’s Bazaar, brags about the honeybee hive on her roof. Last May, Angelina Jolie was photographed by National Geographic covered in a bee swarm, next to a headline declaring that the actress “embraces bees — and female beekeepers as environmental guardians.” Today, more than 2.98 million honeybee colonies are currently registered in the United States, according to the US Department of Agriculture — up from 2.35 million colonies in 2002.
But Andrew Coté, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association, said the fear of a honeybee apocalypse is misplaced.
“We are not headed for a world without bees,” he told The Post. “But it’s more titillating to shout that the sky is falling than to understand the real story.”
The idea that honeybees are endangered started in 2006, when commercial beekeepers raised the alarm that their colonies were dropping fast. Some noted they’d seen 90 percent of their bees die or simply vanish in a single winter.
We are not headed for a world without bees. But it’s more titillating to shout that the sky is falling. — Andrew Coté, New York City Beekeepers Association
Dubbed “Colony Collapse Disorder,” experts could find no reason for the problem. Some blamed pesticides and genetically modified crops, others pointed to parasitic Varroa mites or climate change. There was even speculation that radiation from cellphones was responsible.
Whatever the reason, panic ensued. The media had a field day, publishing warnings about an inevitable “bee-maggedon” or “bee-pocalypse” posing a “threat to our food supply.” It culminated in a 2013 cover story from Time magazine, with the fearmongering headline: “A World Without Bees: The Price We’ll Pay If We Don’t Figure Out What’s Killing the Honeybee.”
(Beekeepers Association president Coté provided the bee featured on that infamous Time cover, but he was never quoted in the story.)
Manu Saunders, an entomologist and professor at the University of New England in Australia, agrees that the media created a dystopian bee hysteria.
“As a species, the honeybee is not in danger of going extinct or suffering major declines,” she told The Post. In fact, she added, “the number of honeybees in the world has been steadily increasing in the past few decades.”
THE first case of honeybees mysteriously vanishing in large numbers was recorded in the late 1800s in Colorado, when it was called “disappearing disease,” long before synthetic pesticides were the norm. The dwindling colonies were blamed on lack of pollen or particularly hot summers. After that, honeybee popula
tions experienced sporadic disappearances over the last century, before hitting a 20-year high in 2015. Globally, honeybees have increased by 30 percent since 2000, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
“I know we keep hearing about annual losses of 20 to 30 percent,” said Stephen Buchmann, a pollination ecologist specializing in bees and an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona. “These [episodes] are often regional, spotty, and in no way mean that all the commercially managed honeybee colonies in the US routinely and steadily drop by 30 percent each year.”
Those numbers don’t even include wild honeybee colonies.
“In my own state of Arizona, the feral Africanized honeybee population likely outnumbers the managed her weight in eggs daily, laying up to 2,000 eggs per day.”
But many hobby beekeepers have bought into the scare stories, believing their hives were helping save the bees. A Post story about urban beekeepers from 2018 found that even the youngest honeybee advocates think their efforts are making a difference. Kendal Chapman, 17, who tends to a hive with her mom in Tribeca, said she was inspired by a story about the dwindling numbers of bees in nature.
“I decided instead of worrying, I should do something,” she told The Post.
But Chapman and her fellow enthusiasts aren’t saving anything, Coté said.
“They think they are,” he said. “They are not.”
NOT only are honeybees not endangered, they may be responsible for declines in other bee populations. There are just 4,000 bee species native to North America (out of 20,000 globally), and the European honeybee isn’t one of them. They were first brought to this continent in the 17th century and quickly became an essential livestock, with beeswax a major export and honey honeybees by 10 to 1, or greater,” used to make everything from said Buchmann. sweetener to medicine to cement.
And yet the media handwringing The problem, said Saunders, about honeybees continues. The is that their presence “could New York Times reported in July be harming wild insects in that “Beekeeping Is Booming in many places. Increasing New York,” just a few years after numbers of honeybees publishing the hair-raising headline may be depleting resources “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here.” As that wild insects recently as this past August, ABC need, spreading parasites News was reporting that the national and diseases to wild insects.” honeybee population had decreased by 40 percent every winter “These colonies pull a huge since 2018, and quoted concerned amount of floral resources, like nectar entomologists who warned that this and pollen, out of the wildlands,” decline was “unsustainable.” added Buchmann. “This takes food
Their numbers aren’t wrong, says out of the mouths of native bees and Coté, they just don’t show the whole other pollinators.” story. “There are winter losses,” he One insect the honeybee hurts says. “But even a 40 percent reported most is the humble bumblebee, loss leaves 60 percent remaining. which is native to North America. Then the colonies rebuild and multiply According to the New York Department come spring. The queen bee lays of Environmental Conserwould vation, the American bumblebee has declined by 99 percent in New York state over just the last 20 years. And yet the US Fish and Wildlife Service has been slow to grant bumblebees Endangered Species Act protection. (They finally did last August, to the Bombus franklini genus of bumblebee, native to southern Oregon and northern California.)
What’s especially ironic, Buchmann added, is that honeybees aren’t always the best pollinators of crops or wild plants. “Honeybees do not ‘sonicate’ flowers” — also known as buzz pollination — “and so they are not good pollinators of tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, blueberries or cranberries. Bumblebees are much better in these cases.”
Alison McAfee, an entomologist who studies honeybee reproductive health, stepped away from her own honey beekeeping hobby last year when she discovered the damage her tiny pets were causing.
“If the financial resources and time spent keeping honeybees just for fun was instead invested in activities that provide a direct benefit to native species, like landscape restoration or planting native forage meadows and trees, the native bees
be better off,” she told The Post.
THE misconception that honeybees are in trouble has been good for one thing: business. Bees in New York are sold by weight, which Coté compares to cheese. A “package” of bees typically costs between $185 and $225.
In addition to selling honey, Cote’s family business, Silvermine Apiary, LLC (also known as Andrew’s Honey) also offers bee wrangling, swarm removals, and live bees by the pound.
“Generally, a package of bees is three pounds, which equates to about 12,000 honeybees,” he said. “We have an annual Running of the Bees and distribute hundreds of packages in Manhattan and the boroughs every April.”
So long as there is demand, “someone tries to supply that demand,” said Coté. “So long as hobbyists and side liners wish to be in the beekeeping game, breeders will crank out as many packages of honeybees as consumers will purchase.”
Since New York state legalized beekeeping in 2010 — and New York magazine was advising readers to “think of them as your new pets” — interest in the hobby has grown “exponentially . . . at least fourfold,” Coté said.
But exact numbers are hard to come by, or verify. While the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which oversees city beekeeping, has official records for just 326 registered hives in 2020, Coté estimates that the real number is “closer to 1,000.”
All 50 states have a different way of keeping track of honeybee colony numbers from year to year, said Buchmann, and “some aren’t even mandated to keep any records. We don’t actually know exactly how many bee colonies we have or don’t have.” Beekeepers have “a bit of a rogue lifestyle,” he continued. “They don’t like the IRS to know how many ‘heads’ they have on the range.”
Buchmann suspects that some organizations, like the American
Honey Producers Association and the American Beekeeping Federation, “stand to gain in terms of federal grants and research dollars” if it appears that honeybee numbers are dwindling.
Vince Tepedino, a retired bee biologist, takes an even more cynical view. “Ask yourself who stands to benefit from the ‘honeybee apocalypse,’ ” he told The Post. “Honeybeezers, scientists who want research money, media outlets who want to sensationalize.”
But none of this concerns beekeeper Dodds in Ohio, who continues to believe in the benefits of beekeeping — and his own personal hive.
If nothing else, he said, “my wife gets free honey.”