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US keepers of honeybees lost about 38 percent of their colonies over the 2018–19 winter, according to preliminary results from a survey conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership, an organization devoted to understanding honeybee declines. Some winter losses are expected, but this year’s were 7 percentage points higher than last year’s, 9 percentage points above the average of all winter losses since 2006, when the annual survey started, and the highest they’ve been in the survey’s history.
“It’s disconcerting that we’re still seeing elevated losses after over a decade of survey and quite intense work to try to understand and reduce colony loss,” report coauthor Geoffrey Williams, an entomologist at Auburn University in Alabama, tells The Guardian.
The partnership surveyed 47,000 beekeepers across all 50 states who care for an estimated 12 percent of the US’s managed (as opposed to wild) honeybee colonies.
Colony losses for ...
