USDA research points to viruses spread by pesticide-resistant mites, indicating a worrying trend
U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter.
As soon as scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught wind of the record-breaking die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs by President Donald Trump’s administration. Now, 6 months later, USDA scientists have finally identified a culprit.
According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal.
What is the change in the percentage of earth’s surface being farmed over that time?
I am skeptical that we are using enough more land to account for this.
Climate and chemicals seem more likely to me, but your idea is interesting if there is data to back it up.
This is a great article that breaks down land use.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
44% of habitable land is used for human agriculture. Most of that is used for livestock. One thousand years ago, only 4% of habitable land was used for human agriculture. Humans are the leading cause of habitat loss, which has lead to the fastest decline in biodiversity and ecological stability in history. Modern agriculture is one of the largest contributors to our climate and chemical problems, too.
We aren’t. In fact, Europe has increased it’s forest cover a great deal since WW2, and NA hasn’t increased farmland significantly since about the same time.
This is purely pulled out of someone’s ass. Bees were perfectly viable until the last couple decades, in fact most beekeepers in Canada would just let the hives die in the winter because it was cheaper to get new queens in the spring from California than to try to keep hives alive over the winter.
It should be noted that honey bees are not native to the US so are a wholly farmed animal.
The method of fully replacing colonies is one of the issues in commercial beekeeping as the genetic diversity is very poor because there aren’t enough different suppliers.
Edit - just seen someone else has said much the same
I’m fully in agreement that the lack of diversity is a long-term issue. But it has nothing to do with monoculture cropping or unsubstantiated farmland increases. This is a problem with apiary management practices and lack of ability to deal with disease vectors.
Currently they replace queens from Australia because so far that population hasn’t been hit as hard. But shipping them that far is expensive and has a high mortality/non-viability rate.
Probably less of an issue with land and more of a symptom of heavily relying on a monoculture of non native insect for pollenation. European honey bees aren’t native to America and will be a lot more susceptible to something like mites compared to their more solitary native cousins.
To me this is less of an economic disaster for honey producers than it is an ecological one. All agricultural monocultures are going to face challenges as they become more established over time.
Something I picked up on at uni re commercial beeking practices is that the cell size is dictated by the farmer by providing a framework for the bees to build around and lay their eggs in (as well as store honey). This cell size is larger than the natural mean size. This results in larger adults that can then forage more and produce more honey. Great! Except that the bees spend longer as larvae and if there’s varroa mite present in the hive the adults come out weakened as the mites feed on the larvae for longer.
For me colony collapse disorder hinges around this, but I haven’t read about this subject in some years so don’t know if it has been discounted.
Very much so an economic problem, commercial honey production is a very intensive type of animal husbandry.
As another commenter has already said, this article provides a great insight into this.
Human land use has gone up from 4% during the medieval ages to 44% today, so it has increased by a factor of 10x, while, as i wrote above, population count has gone up by 30x. That means that land produces 3x the food today than it did a thousand years ago.
Notice, however, that the land that’s being used for agriculture though is the most fertile land, i.e. farmers try to maximize their profit by farming the most fertile lands. So, “44% of land usage” might be misleading, as it would suggest that we’re just using every second acre, while in fact, the land that we don’t use either has lower livability for both humans and insects, or is mountaineous area which is difficult to access for vehicles and heavy machines.