A national survey of managed honey bee 2013–2014 annual colony losses in the USA

By Kathleen V. Lee, Nathalie Steinhauer, Karen Rennich, Michael E. Wilson, David R. Tarpy, D. Caron, R. Rose, K. Delaplane, Kathy Baylis, E. Lengerich and 6 more. Apidologie, 2015

384 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Honey bee colony losses are a major concern in the USA and across the globe. Long-term data on losses are critical for putting yearly losses in context. US colony loss surveys have been conducted yearly since the winter of 2006–2007. Here, we report the results from the eighth annual survey on winter losses and the second annual survey of summer and annual losses. There were 7425 valid respondents (7123 backyard, 190 sideline, and 112 commercial beekeepers) managing 497,855 colonies, 19 % of the total US colonies. Total losses reported were 19.8 % [95 % CI 19.3–20.3 %] over the summer, 23.7 % [95 % CI 23.3–24.1 %] over the winter, and 34.1 % [95 % CI 33.6–34.6 %] for the whole year. Average losses were 15.1 % [95 % CI 14.5–15.7 %] over the summer, 44.8 % [95 % CI 43.9–45.7 %] over the winter, and 51.1 % [95 % CI 50.2–51.6 %] for the whole year. While total winter loss was one of the lowest reported in 8 years, 66 % of all beekeepers had higher losses than they deemed acceptable.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/618a20caaef6063f0285582815b170ac2391265d

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Citations in the corpus

A national survey of managed honey bee 2014–2015 annual colony losses in the USA (2015, neutral): “Commercial beekeepers reported varroa as the most common cause of colony losses, displacing queen failure as the top reason (Lee et al., 2015; Steinhauer et al., 2014).”
Trends in beekeeping and honey bee colony losses in Latin America (2018, background): “Among the most renowned ones, the Bee Informed Partnership has developed a national monitoring program in USA carried out annually since 2007 (Kulhanek et al., 2017), while the honey bee research association COLOSS (Brodschneider et al., 2016) and the EPILOBEE consortium (Jacques et al., Correspondi”
Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers (2019, background): “Two thirds of American beekeepers presently lose about 40% of their colonies every year (Kulhanek et al., 2017), whereas 30% annual losses are reported for Europe, 29% in South Africa (Pirk et al.”
Multi-country loss rates of honey bee colonies during winter 2016/2017 from the COLOSS survey (2018, background): “Our results are broadly in accordance with reports from the USA, where migratory beekeeping was not found to increase colony loss rates (Kulhanek et al., 2017; Seitz et al., 2016).”