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.
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.
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.
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.