Honeybee decline could be a ‘huge problem’ for US agriculture

Honeybee decline could be a ‘huge problem’ for US agriculture

The honeybee population is facing an existential crisis. A recent report shows commercial beehives have experienced a 62% loss nationwide in less than a year, accounting for hundreds of millions of bee deaths.

This isn’t just bad news for beekeepers and people who love honey. Pollinators are essential for all sorts of U.S. agriculture. This population decline means fewer pollinators for crops like almonds, apples, blueberries and more — leading to lower yields and higher prices at the grocery store.

It’s not just an existential crisis for the bees; in the long term, we can expect devastating effects on biodiversity and climate stability. Dr. Noah Wilson-Rich, bee scientist and founder of the Best Bees Company , joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to detail what’s behind this massive die-off, what it means, and what can be done to reverse the trend. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: First, I want to have some context in this because I first recall hearing about a crisis with honeybee populations about 20 years ago. It was called “colony collapse disorder,” and it was wiping out so many bees. Could you put this current crisis in context?

Noah Wilson-Rich: That’s right. So, around 2006 was when beekeepers around Pennsylvania and New York State started to notice their beehives were doing great one day, and then, just a few days later, there would be tens of thousands of bees missing — just vanished, with no signs of disease. The queen was there, there’d be honey, and it was a total mystery.

I had started my Ph.D. studies at Tuft’s University in biology, looking at bees around 2005. And then, this question and this phenomenon of colony collapse disorder just shifted my entire research trajectory to try to understand what was killing bees, what was causing colony collapse disorder, and what we could learn about it to really stabilize our global economy and food supply system.

Over the past 20 years, there have been a lot of changes. Now, there are surveys in place to understand and better monitor where bees are dying and where they’re thriving. Our network of research beehives with Best Bees across the United States is now an indicator of where pollinators are thriving, where they are dying, looking at people’s home gardens, business roofs, even institutional and government campuses, and then developing research tools and technologies and innovations to understand how we can improve their health.

The bee decline is at its worst ever at 62% of commercial beehives lost in this new survey from June 2024 to February 2025. This survey included over a million beehives. It’s a huge survey, and this is, by far, the worst loss that we have ever seen since we’ve started recording data when colony collapse disorder started.

Rath: That’s amazing. You were a freshly minted bee scientist and researcher right when this first started happening. Is this current decline — the 60% that you were just talking about — part of colony collapse disorder, or is this something different going on now?

Wilson-Rich: So, colony collapse disorder was a very strange phenomenon where bees were vanishing. They were just disappearing. This made the mainstream media around 2007 — it was kind of like a missing body story with “CSI” and those other shows — and people were interested. Where are the bees going?! There were amazing hypotheses from cellphones to aliens out there. Really, what seems to have been associated with this phenomenon ended around 2011.

Bees are still dying. What’s killing bees these days continues to be the varroa mite. This mite is a vector of other diseases. It first came to the United States in 1987, and with it brought so many other infections of bees, bacterial infections, viral infections. It’s a real problem for which there are very few solutions.

However, with my research and my teams, we’ve been able to do multiple methods to combat varroa mites and improve bee nutrition through the honey DNA results that we’re starting to create more plant biodiversity. In some areas of the country, with my team at Best Bees, we have seen amazing results with 0% losses off beehives.

So, in the strictest sense, colony collapse disorder is no longer happening, yet the bees are still dying, and we still need to care. Anybody who eats food or breathes air needs the plants that bees are a major part of pollinating and promoting.

Rath: Could you talk in a bit more detail about that and what this particular decline this last year means for food supply?

Wilson-Rich: Bees are essential for agriculture. Bees are about 10% of the world’s total pollinators. There are about 200,000 species of pollinators hard at work every single day, touching flower blossoms that the turn into our crunchy almonds or our tart lemons or our sweet apples.

So many of the fruit and vegetable crops that we rely upon for our own food, as well as the hay and alfalfa crops that our entire cattle industry relies on — for meat and dairy and cheese that we love — these foods rely on pollination. Bees are the largest agricultural tool worldwide for a pollination service.

We rely on bees for food and for air. Without bees, the world would look very different. We might not starve, but we would have a very carb-friendly diet, which isn’t necessarily the trend that most people are going in today.

Rath: Also, with something like, say almonds, if you’re not getting pollinators, that’s also wasting a ton of water.

Wilson-Rich: Absolutely. Almonds are a very water-intensive crop. Every single almond that we eat comes because a honeybee pollinated that flower. Nothing else pollinates almonds than bees; it is so intertwined.

Even the economic contribution of a little bee — you know, we’re thinking, “OK, well, so what? It’s a little insect, right?” Bees contribute over $120 billion to the global economy every year. In the United States alone, it’s over $20 billion for their role as pollinators.

This is so important for everybody to understand, because a little bee goes a long way at saving the world, and everybody can make an impact at this. When we’re talking about what anybody can do to “save the bees,” we can think about planting a flower. When we are looking at the plant DNA in honey, it’s really just plant juice.

Right now, thanks to the science that I’ve developed, we can understand what flower type of honey we are eating, what our neighborhoods taste like, and the results can empower individuals on what to plant and promote more of in their own neighborhood. We share these results for free online at my nonprofit’s website, urbanbeelab.org .

Our research is finding consistently that what’s most associated with improved bee health is a diverse, native flower population. So, think about planting a flower. You can do guerrilla gardening if you don’t have your own property, where you just throw a handful of native seeds, or even plant some of those on green rooftops — they go a very long way, we see that bee biodiversity is comparable on roofs and grounds. Cities are a wonderful opportunity to improve the biodiversity of the flowers that they rely upon.

Again, in the face of now 62% losses in the commercial sector — which means more [commercial] beehives are dead in America ... than are alive — this is a huge problem because so many know for 20 years now that bees have been declining. But it has never been this bad, and it has not tipped the 50% death mark until last year. Now, it’s at 62% for commercial beehives.

It’s a very big problem. We do have solutions. There is reason to hope. And I’m really happy to share this with people because, honestly, it comes down to getting out there, planting a flower, and promoting this cause — talking about it and feeling empowered to make a difference.