California’s almond crop threatened by ‘catastrophic’ honeybee losses
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Last month, trucks loaded with beehives rolled into Desert Creek Honey’s Fresno-area facility, delivering millions of honeybees primed to pollinate almond trees across the Central Valley. But operations manager Marcus Hill noticed that as many as half of each truck’s hives were dead.
“Usually you might get 5% to 6% that look like that, but when it’s most of the truck, truck after truck after truck after truck, you know pretty quickly that something’s wrong,” said Hill, himself a beekeeper who splits his time between California and Texas.
Beekeepers nationwide have reported stunning losses to already-precarious bee populations this year — commercial beekeepers lost an average of 62% of their bees from June 2024 to February 2025, according to a survey of 702 beekeepers administered by Project Apis m., a nonprofit dedicated to beekeeping research. Factoring in losses from smaller beekeepers, the industry saw a “catastrophic” loss of 1.1 million colonies this year, the nonprofit said in a statement.
Losses on that scale imperil each element of the complex pollination infrastructure that underpins much of domestic agriculture — from beekeepers, to bee brokers, to growers of pollination-dependent crops, which run the gamut from almonds to melons to cherries to vegetables.
Beekeeper Marcus Hill clears bees searching for food inside boxes of dead beehives stacked at the central hub of Desert Creek Bulk Bees. Beekeepers, brokers and growers have been searching desperately for bees this year, Hill says.
Chief among the at-risk crops are almonds. Every February, millions of almond trees in California’s Central Valley burst into pink and white blossoms, which eventually become almonds — but only if pollinated.
Unlike other crops, which can self-pollinate or rely on wind, beetles or other methods for pollination, almond trees’ biology makes them dependent on honeybees, said Aaron Smith, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Berkeley. As many as 90% of the nation’s bees migrate — or are trucked in — to California for the all-important almond bloom, he said.
With so many hives wiped out this year, some beekeepers said there might not be enough bees left alive to pollinate almonds, the state’s fifth most valuable crop, according to 2023 data. Hill estimated that growers might come up short by 300,000 to 500,000 hives; no official estimates were available.
“My phone has been ringing off the hook for a couple weeks now with other beekeepers, brokers, growers, all of the above, searching desperately for bees,” said Hill, who was able to scrounge up the roughly 40,000 hives the company had promised to almond growers this season but turned down many others. “If I can help, I do what I can. If not, I say ‘sorry.’”
Beekeeper Marcus Hill shows a dead beehive at Desert Creek Bulk Bees.
Widespread bee losses could have a “large effect” on almond production, Smith said. “In a typical year, we use about one bee for every 20 almonds that are produced,” he said. “That’s a lot of almonds potentially not produced.”
Ryan Burris, president of the California State Beekeepers Association, said that bee shortages for almonds have seemed possible for a couple of years, and “this year we might actually see it.”
In a joint statement, the Almond Alliance and the California Almond Board said they were aware of hive loss reports. “We take our partnership with the beekeeping industry seriously and are prepared to support with additional resources once we learn more,” spokespeople for the groups said.
Because almonds are often sold raw, supply shortages could translate directly into steeper costs for consumers, Smith said. “If you’re buying raw almonds in the store to snack on, the price of those could conceivably go up quite a bit.”
In both scope and symptoms, this year’s bee die-off is reminiscent of the last major bee disaster: colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon with still-elusive origins that scientists estimate killed between 750,000 and 1 million colonies over the winter of 2007-08.
Just like with CCD, these losses have a “strange suite of symptoms,” said Danielle Downey, executive director of Project Apis m. Beekeepers are not opening their hives to find boxes of bee carcasses; rather, they’re finding colonies stocked with food, a queen bee and larvae — but no adult bees.
Bees try to find food within a dead hive at Desert Creek Bulk Bees. Possible culprits for the bee die-off include pesticides, parasites, pathogens and poor nutrition.
“It’s a colony that looks like it was good pretty recently, and now, where are the bees?” Downey said. “It obviously happened pretty fast, because otherwise the resources in the colony would be depleted.”
In a statement, the United States Department of Agriculture said it is “aware of the unusual losses to our nation’s honeybee colonies” and “concerned about its potential impact on food production and supply.” Researchers from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service collected samples from beekeepers and are in the process of analyzing them for pathogens and parasites, the agency said. So far, the losses do not seem to be attributable to levels of parasitic mites nor to beekeepers’ mite control practices, nutritional supplements or wintering strategies, the USDA said.
There’s no shortage of possible culprits for the die-off, Downey said, citing the “four P’s” of bee threats: pesticides, parasites, pathogens and poor nutrition. To make matters worse, beehive theft is “spiking,” she said, as the precious pollination resource becomes scarce.
Beekeepers are used to being buffered by a “perfect storm” of challenges — so much so that winter loss rates of 40% to 45% have become accepted as somewhat normal, said Blake Shook, who owns Desert Creek Honey and transports bees to California every year. Those high loss rates are sustainable only because beekeepers can recoup their losses by breeding the remaining bees, he said.
A chunk of beeswax on the ground on the edge of an almond orchard near Desert Creek Bulk Bees.
But loss rates of more than 50% go beyond the industry’s “breaking point,” Shook said. “Once we get to 70% to 80%, you can’t recoup your numbers anymore. It’s a scary place, and we should be worried about national food security.”
For commercial beekeepers, who have been operating on razor-thin profit margins for years, this die-off is the latest blow, Downey said.
The losses translate to about $428 million in lost income from almond pollination contracts and $225 million in replacement costs for Project Apis m. survey respondents, who account for about 68% of the country’s bees. That’s probably an underestimate, because the survey does not include lost income from blighted honey production or non-almond pollination contracts left unfulfilled.
If beekeepers “can’t make it, there’s no backup plan,” Downey said. “If these businesses fail, growers will find a very hard time getting their crop pollinated.”
Ryan Jacobsen, an almond grower and the CEO of the Fresno County Farm Bureau, said that if he did not have honeybee pollination, “I would not have a crop.” Though self-pollinating almond varieties are on the rise, Jacobsen said, most growers he knows still rely on honeybees.
Almond trees blossom at an orchard near Desert Creek Bulk Bees. For the blossoms to turn into almonds, bees must pollinate the trees.
Though Jacobsen was able to receive all the hives he requested, he said he won’t know for sure whether the pollination was of top quality until May, when almond trees begin to bear fruit. If honeybees are weak or compromised, or if cold and wet weather inhibits their flight, they sometimes pollinate less effectively. “We’re not in the panic mode yet,” Jacobsen said. “But obviously that’s an uncertainty until after the pollination has come and went and we can see what took place.”
Logan Clancey, a bee broker who owns Bee Connections in Phoenix, barely managed to find enough bees to fulfill the 59,000 hives he had promised to almond growers in Fresno County. Clancey fielded calls from other almond growers searching for an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 more hives, but he couldn’t find enough supply to meet their demand, leaving them “in a panic.”
“It was just a lot harder to source them, and the ones we did get, the quality wasn’t as good as it normally was,” he said. In normal years, the beehives Clancey brokers are bustling with bees — out of 18 frames in each box, 10 or 11 of those frames are typically covered with bees, a metric for beehive health. But this year, Clancey said, the hives he brokered had many fewer, with just 7.5 out of 18 frames flush with bees.
Clancey worries that honeybee losses could harm his business, which depends on maintaining good relationships with produce growers — from almonds to blueberries, apples to cranberries. “If we take bees that aren’t up to standard, that damages our relationship with the growers, and if we simply can’t come up with the bees, it also damages our relationship,” he said.
Beekeeper Marcus Hill handles a successful beehive in an almond orchard near Desert Creek Bulk Bees.
Tim Hollmann, who operates about 7,000 hives in South Dakota with his wife and two sons, said his family is struggling to keep up morale after losing more than 72% of his bees this year, leaving him with just 1,824 viable hives.
He usually sends 3,500 to 4,000 hives to California for the almond bloom; this year he sent just 1,750. That lost revenue from unfulfilled contracts, plus the money he expects to shell out to buy replacement bees, makes this die-off a “double whammy,” Hollmann said.
“As a family farm, it’s hard to sit around the dinner table and not be anything but depressed about the day’s work,” he said. Hollmann’s “tremendous” die-offs have him scratching his head; he said he did not find excessive mite counts in his hives, and the residue left in empty hives does not indicate colonies wiped out by a virus.
A bee pollinates an almond blossom in an orchard near Desert Creek Bulk Bees. Unlike other crops, almond trees’ biology makes them dependent on honeybees.
“It’s not like following a gunshot wound to somebody’s torso — it’s not an obvious kill, if you will,” he said. “So what is the kill? What’s happening here?”
Hollmann said he worries that the die-off portends a larger problem.
“We’re the canary in the coal mine,” he said. “If bees are dying now, that tells you something is wrong with the ecosystem, and what that is remains to be seen.”
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