Despite the hype, there’s still no bee-pocalypse. Two weeks ago, the U.S. Department Agriculture released its latest count of commercial honeybee hives, and although the figure dipped 2.9 percent from the 20-year record-high set in 2014, the overall count of 2.7 million hives in 2015 remains strong. You wouldn’t know it from the news coverage. One Michigan television station recently led with the headline: “Numbers of managed honey bee colonies plummeting.” It explained: “According to the USDA the total number of managed honey bee colonies has decreased by 2.5 million since the 1940s.”[1] This is misleading for a number of reasons. Read more.
