Does America suddenly have a record number of bees?

After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high.

We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country. And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which might outnumber their captive cousins several times over.

We consider the census from the National Agricultural Statistics Service to be the gold standard, though another NASS data set, the annual honey report, actually shows bee colonies losing ground.

Texan beekeepers said they are splitting their hives more often, replacing queens as often as every year and churning out bee colonies faster than mites, fungi and diseases can take them down. But this might not be good news for bees in general.

“It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators,” said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at Binghamton University, who noted that domesticated honeybees are a threat to native bees.

Mace Vaughan leads pollinator and agricultural biodiversity at Xerces, an insect-conservation outfit. Vaughan says it’s not a zero-sum game: For native pollinators to win, honeybees don’t have to lose. If we focus on limiting the use of insecticide and promoting habitats such as meadows, hedgerows and wetlands, all pollinators can come out ahead.