You've heard the news about honeybees.
"Beepocalypse," they've called it.
Beemageddon.
America's honeybees are dying, putting honey production and $15 billion worth of pollinated food crops in jeopardy.
The situation has become so dire that earlier this year the White House put forth the first National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators, a 64-page policy framework for saving the nation's bees, butterflies and other pollinating animals.
The trouble all began in 2006 or so, when beekeepers first began noticing mysterious die-offs.
It was soon christened "colony collapse disorder," and has been responsible for the loss of 20 to 40 percent of managed honeybee colonies each winter over the past decade.The math says that if you lose 30 percent of your bee colonies every year for a few years, you rapidly end up with close to 0 colonies left.
But get a load of this data on the number of active bee colonies in the U.S. since 1987.
Pay particular attention to the period after 2006, when CCD was first documented.
As you can see, the number of honeybee colonies has actually risen since 2006, from 2.4 million to 2.7 million in 2014, according to data tracked by the USDA.
The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years.
So if CCD is wiping out close to a third of all honeybee colonies a year, how are their numbers rising?
One word: Beekeepers.
A 2012 working paper by Randal R. Tucker and Walter N. Thurman, a pair of agricultural economists, explains that seasonal die-offs have always been a part of beekeeping: they report that before CCD, American beekeepers would typically lose 14 percent of their colonies a year, on average..."
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