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.
USDA did not provide comment on its research to Science after multiple inquiries spanning nearly 3 weeks, with one spokesperson citing a need “to move [the request] through agency clearance.”
How fun.
They rushed into action how exactly? It’s been known and reported for multiple years. The Varroa management book discusses their ability to develop resistance to chemical treatments.
Whole section on managing potential resistance and rotating active ingredients used in control. That information was published in 2022. I can’t tell if it is just government bodies trying to give credit for their earlier work to new people/incompetence by the administration to not already have that information or who knows what
https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/resources/varroa-management/
(Sorry, bothered me because I remembered reading about them when I was contemplating getting bees, but I put them off because I wanted to make sure my chickens were doing well and not get my hands to full all at once.)
Perhaps the point here is not the mites ability to resist but the fact the surge in bee deaths was caused by mites.
I think there’s an element of media click bait and finger pointing to funding cuts to sell an otherwise mediocre story.
On miticide resistance from 2001. Looking at what’s required to keep resistance down… can’t see how that could have been achieved without heavy regulation, and the US is all outta regulation.
Mite-specific pesticide resistance. Last line of defense. Hmmmm. Seems fine.
The varroa mite has been blamed for years. It’s been a growing issue for decades. And scientists found out in the 80s and 90s that you can use formic acid to treat for them, instead of any commercial miticide.
Interesting. Wikipedia says formic acid can kill the queen, and lists other treatments, some of which are apparently more effective.
I kinda assume that insect-dying is mostly perpretated by taking all of their land away and drying up the wetlands.
I.e., hundreds of years ago, the world had 300 Million people on it. Now we have close to 10 billion, up by a factor of 30x.
That means we consume more food. Even with better soil fertility, we need more land.
That automatically and necessarily leads to a displacement of other species. Turns out that not only humans need land to live, but so does every other species. If you take that land away from them, they die. Simple as that.
I assume that it will be very difficult or close to impossible to do anything against large-scale insect dyings as long as humans take up so much space to produce food. Of course, insular areas can be reserved for wildlife to make sure that some native species survive, but it’s only a small patch to conserve the species, not a large-scale spread of insects across the land. At least that’s my view of it. It’s not so much the chemicals that are poisoning our insects (that too, but it’s not the biggest contributor), but simply the fact that we till so much soil every autumn/winter, that it disrupts insects breeding in that soil.
I.e., hundreds of years ago, the world had 300 Million people on it. Now we have close to 10 billion, up by a factor of 30x.
Hundreds of years ago there were no honey bees in America. They are an invasive species there, brought from Europe.
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.
My state went “oopsie!” in the news a few times after deaths directly from mosquito spraying. Somehow all manner of wasps abound.
It should be noted that most wasps are vital pollinators
Isn’t that only because other species have dies off and they filled the void?
Nope, there are thousands of native wasp species in North America. Most of them are small, have no stinger, and are vegetarian. You might glance at them and think they’re flies. There are tens of thousands of plant species that rely on them for pollination.
Honey bees, on the other hand, are actually invasive in North America after they were imported from Europe.
Wasps are super important, besides the direct pollinators there are those that parasitize various caterpillars, including invasive ones. I do as much as possible to make wasps at home in my area.
Are red wasps, yellow jackets and whatever those black ones with green stripes? The red wasps are not as aggressive as yellow jackets. Not sure about the green on black ones, they’ve only shown themselves to me recently and I’m not trying to get close enough to fafo.
They are! Those are all paper wasps, which feed on nectar in addition to other insects, like caterpillars.
I bet they have a nasty sting. Do they also bite
linelike yellow jackets?Many paper wasps have very painful stings. Red hornets and yellow jackets are just two species of paper wasps
6 months later? They’ve been working on the die-off issues for the last decade, if not longer.
At least a decade. I did a small module at uni about a decade ago on colony collapse disorder and varroa mites were a prime culprit, alongside various viruses. Plenty of research already done then, but no concrete answer at that time.
This is hardly news per se, rather a typical attention grabbing media headline saying that they came to a conclusion what the cause was last year after 6 months, whilst blaming cutbacks.
The mites:
Hopefully the bees will follow suit.
It’s a shame they’ll close the USDA at some point because they don’t give a fuck about anyone.
Upton Sinclair will roll in his grave
