Story by Phoebe Weston

Last December, his bees were wintering in California when the weather turned cold. Bees grouped on top of hives trying to keep warm. “Every time I went out to the beehive there were less and less,” says Adee. “Then a week later, there’d be more dead ones to pick up … every week there is attrition, just continually going down.”

Adee went on to lose 75% of his bees. “It’s almost depressingly sad,” he says. “If we have a similar situation this year – I sure hope we don’t – then we’re in a death spiral.”

It developed into the largest US honeybee die-off on record, with beekeepers losing on average 60% of their colonies, at a cost of $600m (£440m).

Scientists have been scrambling to discover what happened; now the culprits are emerging. A research paper published by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), though not yet peer-reviewed, has found nearly all colonies had contracted a bee virus spread by parasitic mites that appear to have developed resistance to the main chemicals used to control them.

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But the discovery of amitraz-resistant mites in hives does not mean they alone were responsible for all of last year’s record die-offs. A combination of factors is likely to be causing successive colony deaths among US bees, including the changing climate, exposure to pesticides, and less food in the form of pollen and nectar as monocrop farming proliferates. Many US beekeepers now expect to lose 30% of their colony or more every year.

These wider combined factors are also devastating for wild pollinators and native bee species – and honeybees, which are closely monitored by their keepers, may be acting as a canary in the coalmine for pressures affecting insects more generally.

Almost all bee colonies have these viruses, but they only do significant harm when the colony is stressed.

Read full article here:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/could-become-a-death-spiral-scientists-discover-what-s-driving-record-die-offs-of-us-honeybees/ar-AA1IbfPh

[Note from webmaster: I live next to a golf course and observe thousands of dead bees on the sidewalks after pollinating flowers are sprayed with insecticides or when weed killiers are applied.  Even a 3 year old could make the connection between the spraying and the dead insects. — S. Byron Gassaway]

Also see:

This report seems to be a roundabout way to link pesticides and perhaps herbicides with Parkinson Disease. It figures if the various “cides” kill bees and other insects by attacking their nervous systems, they would also attack the nervous systems of mammals.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2833716#google_vignette