Why Honeybee Colonies Keep Dying: What the 2024–2026 Loss Data Show, and What a Bee Sanctuary Can and Can’t Do

In 2014, actor Morgan Freeman told a late-night television audience that he had started keeping bees. He had brought 26 hives from Arkadelphia, Arkansas, to his 124-acre ranch in Charleston, Mississippi, planted magnolia, clover, and lavender, and was feeding the colonies sugar water without wearing a bee suit. He had no plans to harvest honey. As WLBT reported, Freeman described a “frightening loss of bee colonies” as his motivation. The story went viral and has resurfaced online every few years since, usually framed as a celebrity turning his land into a bee sanctuary.

The loss he was talking about has not gone away. The two worst years for American honeybee colonies on record came a decade after that interview. This article looks at what the most recent national surveys show, what federal scientists identified as the cause of the 2025 collapse, how honeybee losses differ from the decline of wild bees, and which actions by individuals and landowners actually make a measurable difference.

What the Numbers Show: Two Record Years, Then a Partial Recovery

Since 2010, a national survey now led by Auburn University, in collaboration with Oregon State University and the Apiary Inspectors of America, has tracked the share of managed honeybee colonies that die each year. For most of the 2010s, annual losses hovered between roughly 30 and 45 percent. Beekeepers say they can sustain losses of about 15 to 20 percent without serious damage to their businesses.

The 2023–24 survey year set a record at 55.1 percent. The following year was worse. The 2024–25 survey estimated that 55.6 percent of managed colonies were lost between April 2024 and April 2025, the highest rate since the survey began. Winter losses alone reached 40.2 percent, above the previous winter record of 37.7 percent. Loss rates by state ranged from 34.3 percent to 90.5 percent. More than 2,400 beekeepers managing about 219,000 colonies took part.

A separate, faster survey coordinated by the nonprofit Project Apis m. with the American Beekeeping Federation and the American Honey Producers Association captured the scale of the crisis as it was unfolding in early 2025. It found that commercial beekeepers, those running more than 500 colonies, lost an average of 62 percent of their colonies between June 2024 and February 2025. Sideliners lost 54 percent and hobbyists 50 percent. The reversal was notable: commercial operations usually lose fewer colonies than hobbyists, thanks to scale and professional management. The survey estimated more than 1.1 million colonies lost among respondents alone.

The most recent data offer some relief. The 2025–26 survey, released in June 2026, estimated annual losses of 39.9 percent, a return to the range beekeepers had grown used to over the previous decade. Winter losses were 30.3 percent. The survey covered about 13.2 percent of the roughly 2.4 million managed honey-producing colonies in the United States, down from about 2.6 million before the two record years. Industry leaders were blunt that the improvement was not a victory; the American Honey Producers Association called losing nearly 40 percent of colonies in a year a crisis in slow motion.

What Killed the Colonies in 2025

When commercial beekeepers began reporting sudden, severe losses in January 2025, just as colonies were being moved into California for almond pollination, scientists at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service collected samples from affected operations in California and other western states. In June 2025, ARS announced that it had found high levels of deformed wing virus A and B and acute bee paralysis virus in all the sampled bees. Experimental inoculation supported those viruses as the likely cause of death in collapsing colonies.

The viruses are spread by Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite that feeds on developing and adult bees. When ARS scientists screened mites from collapsed colonies, they found signs of resistance to amitraz, one of the most widely used miticides in commercial beekeeping, in virtually all of them. ARS estimated that more than 60 percent of commercial colonies had been lost since the previous summer, representing about 1.7 million colonies and roughly $600 million in losses. ARS research leader Judy Chen cautioned that while viruses were the likely end-stage cause, the results did not rule out other long-known stressors.

The finding matters because it points to a specific, fixable problem. Beekeepers have relied heavily on amitraz because it is effective, inexpensive, and relatively easy on bees. If mites are becoming resistant, treatment programs need to rotate among different miticides and non-chemical methods, and new treatments need to be developed and approved. It also suggests that some of the 2025 losses occurred because mite loads looked controlled on paper while treatments were quietly failing.

Why Varroa Is at the Center of Almost Every Loss Story

Varroa mites arrived in the United States in 1987 and spread across the country within a few years. Before Varroa, feral honeybee colonies living in hollow trees were common; within a decade, most had disappeared. Managed colonies survive only because beekeepers monitor and treat for mites.

The mite does two kinds of damage. It feeds on the fat body of bees, the organ that stores nutrients and supports immunity and detoxification, which weakens individual bees and shortens their lives. And it acts like a dirty needle, injecting viruses directly into the bee’s body. Deformed wing virus existed before Varroa, but at low levels. Mite transmission turned it into a major killer, and viral strains have evolved to take advantage of the new route.

Mite populations grow through the summer as colonies raise brood. If mite loads are not brought down before late summer, the long-lived “winter bees” that must carry the colony through to spring are raised already infected and short-lived. Colonies that look strong in August can dwindle and die by January. That timing helps explain why winter losses are so often the largest share of annual loss, and why the 2025 collapse became visible in midwinter.

From Colony Collapse Disorder to Today

Public concern about honeybees took off in the winter of 2006–07, when commercial beekeepers reported that adult bees were vanishing from hives, leaving behind the queen, brood, and stored food. The phenomenon was named colony collapse disorder (CCD). News coverage framed it as a mystery, and theories ranged from pesticides to cell phone signals. Over the next decade, researchers concluded that CCD did not have a single cause. The classic CCD pattern, with adult bees disappearing rather than dying in the hive, is now reported much less often.

What replaced it in the scientific picture was a clearer understanding of chronic, multifactorial loss. National surveys launched in the late 2000s showed that beekeepers were losing about a third of their colonies each winter, well before and well after the CCD headlines. By the mid-2010s, Varroa mites and the viruses they spread had emerged as the most consistent factor across studies, with nutrition, pesticide exposure, and management practices shaping how badly colonies were affected.

The 2025 losses fit that pattern rather than the older CCD narrative. Colonies did not mysteriously empty out; they died of viral infections vectored by mites that treatment was no longer controlling. That clarity is useful. It means the path forward runs through better mite control, better nutrition, and better monitoring, all of which are practical problems with practical solutions.

Varroa Is Not the Only Stressor

Researchers generally describe honeybee losses as the product of several stressors acting together. A widely cited 2015 review in Science by Dave Goulson and colleagues concluded that bee declines are driven by combined stress from parasites, pesticides, and a lack of flowers, and that these factors interact. A bee that is poorly nourished is less able to tolerate a pesticide exposure; a colony weakened by viruses has less capacity to recover from a stretch of bad weather.

Nutrition and forage

Honeybees need a steady supply of pollen for protein and nectar for energy across the season. Large monoculture landscapes, such as corn and soybean belts, offer abundant bloom for a short window and very little the rest of the year. Loss of field margins, hedgerows, and weedy pastures has reduced the diversity of forage in many farming regions. Colonies on poor nutrition raise fewer and weaker bees and are more vulnerable to disease.

Pesticides

Insecticides, especially the neonicotinoid class, have received the most public attention. Neonicotinoids are systemic, meaning they move through a plant’s tissues into pollen and nectar. Laboratory and semi-field studies have shown they can impair bee foraging, navigation, and reproduction at sufficient doses. Field results are more mixed. A large 2017 field study across the United Kingdom, Germany, and Hungary found that the effects of neonicotinoid-treated oilseed rape on honeybees and wild bees differed by country, with negative effects in some locations and none detected in others. The European Union nonetheless banned outdoor use of three major neonicotinoids, imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam, in 2018. In the United States, the EPA regulates pesticides with pollinator risk assessments and label restrictions rather than a blanket ban; its pollinator protection program describes those measures.

Fungicides, long assumed to be safe for bees, have also come under scrutiny because some can make insecticides more toxic when bees are exposed to both, and because they may affect the microbes in stored pollen that bees depend on. Beekeepers themselves apply miticides inside hives, and residues can accumulate in wax over time.

Weather and climate

Unusually warm winters can keep colonies active, burning through stored food; late cold snaps can kill colonies that have started raising brood; droughts reduce nectar flow; and wildfires destroy forage. Beekeepers have reported that erratic seasonal patterns make it harder to time mite treatments and feeding.

Migratory pollination

Much of the commercial honeybee industry is migratory. Every February, beekeepers truck a large share of the country’s colonies into California’s Central Valley to pollinate almond orchards, then move many of them on to apples, cherries, blueberries, and other crops. Moving colonies long distances is stressful, concentrates bees from across the country in one place, and can spread mites and pathogens between operations. It is also the backbone of the commercial beekeeping business model, since pollination fees are often worth more than honey.

The Almond Connection: How Pollination Drives the Bee Business

Understanding honeybee losses requires understanding how commercial beekeeping makes money. For many large operations, the most important income is not honey but pollination fees, and the most important pollination contract is California almonds.

Almond trees bloom in February and require cross-pollination to set nuts. California’s orchards cover well over a million acres, and growers typically rent about two strong colonies per acre. Meeting that demand requires a majority of the nation’s managed colonies to be trucked into the Central Valley during a few weeks each winter. Pollination fees rose sharply after the CCD years as supply tightened, and they now make up a large share of commercial beekeepers’ revenue.

That economic structure has consequences for bee health. Colonies must be built up to full strength in the middle of winter, which often requires supplemental feeding with sugar syrup and pollen substitutes. Bees from across the country are packed together in orchards where they can exchange mites and pathogens. After bloom, many colonies are moved on to other crops or back to honey-producing regions, adding more stress. When losses spike, as they did in 2025, almond growers face higher rental costs and uncertain supply, and beekeepers face the choice of rebuilding quickly or scaling back.

Some growers are experimenting with self-fertile almond varieties that need fewer bees, and with planting cover crops and hedgerows in and around orchards to improve bee nutrition before and after bloom. Both approaches reduce pressure on colonies without eliminating the industry’s dependence on managed pollinators.

Why Colony Numbers Haven’t Collapsed

A common question is how the United States can lose half its colonies in a year and still have millions of hives. The answer is that beekeepers rebuild. A strong colony can be split into two or more, with new queens purchased or raised for the new units. Package bees and nucleus colonies are sold every spring. This constant replacement keeps total colony numbers relatively stable over time, but at a real cost. Project Apis m. conservatively valued replacement at about $200 per colony, not counting labor, feed, or treatments. Rebuilt colonies also produce less honey and are less valuable for pollination in their first months.

In other words, colony counts measure how hard beekeepers are working, not how healthy bees are. A beekeeper who loses half of 1,000 colonies each winter and splits the survivors back up to 1,000 each spring ends the year with the same number of hives and far lower profits. The survey’s drop from about 2.6 million to about 2.4 million managed honey-producing colonies suggests that after two record years, even that rebuilding capacity was stretched.

Honeybees Versus Wild Bees: Two Different Problems

Honeybees are the bees most people picture, but they are not native to the Americas. European settlers brought them in the 1600s, and today they are best understood as managed livestock. North America has around 4,000 native bee species, from large bumblebees to tiny sweat bees, most of which live solitary lives and nest in the ground or in hollow stems.

Native bees face their own decline, and it receives less attention because no one is counting hives. A 2016 study in PNAS led by Insu Koh at the University of Vermont modeled wild bee abundance across the United States and estimated a 23 percent decline between 2008 and 2013, with the steepest losses in major farming regions where demand for pollination was highest. The rusty patched bumblebee, once common across the eastern United States and Upper Midwest, was listed as federally endangered in 2017, the first bee in the continental U.S. to receive that status.

This distinction matters for anyone thinking about “saving the bees.” Adding honeybee hives does not help wild bees, and in some settings it can hurt them. Large numbers of honeybees can compete with native bees for limited pollen and nectar, and managed colonies can spread pathogens to wild pollinators. Conservation scientists generally advise that the most effective way to support bees overall is to improve habitat, which benefits both groups, rather than to add more honeybee hives in places where forage is scarce.

A property like Freeman’s, with large areas of flowering trees and plants and no plan to harvest honey, is a reasonable example of habitat-first thinking. The flowering plants help every pollinator in the area. The 26 honeybee hives are the most visible part of the story but likely the least important part of its ecological value.

Why Pollinators Matter to What We Eat

Pollinator loss is sometimes described as a threat to the entire food supply. The reality is more specific, and in some ways more concerning for nutrition. A 2007 analysis by Alexandra-Maria Klein and colleagues found that 87 of the 115 leading global food crops, about 75 percent, benefit to some degree from animal pollination. Those crops account for roughly 35 percent of global food production by volume. The world’s major calorie sources, wheat, rice, and corn, are wind-pollinated and would not disappear without bees.

What would suffer are the foods that make diets diverse and nutritious: apples, berries, melons, squash, cucumbers, almonds, many seed crops, and forage crops like alfalfa that support dairy and beef production. Without adequate pollination, yields of these crops fall and prices rise. In the United States, USDA notes that honeybees help pollinate crops worth billions of dollars each year. A 2010 review by Simon Potts and colleagues in Trends in Ecology & Evolution documented pollinator declines in multiple regions and warned about the growing mismatch between rising demand for pollinator-dependent crops and the supply of both managed and wild pollinators.

What Individuals and Landowners Can Actually Do

Most people are not going to convert a 124-acre ranch into pollinator habitat. The good news is that small, well-chosen actions add up, particularly when many people in the same area take them. The table below summarizes the most useful steps, who benefits, and how much effort each takes.

Plant for a long season

The single most useful thing most people can do is plant flowers, ideally native species suited to their region, chosen so that something is blooming from early spring to late fall. Early spring bloomers such as willows, red maples, and native fruit trees feed bees when colonies are building up. Late-season plants such as asters and goldenrods help colonies store food for winter. Clusters of the same plant are easier for bees to find and use than scattered single plants. Local extension offices and native plant societies publish regional planting lists.

Cut back on pesticides, especially during bloom

Many insecticide applications in home landscapes are cosmetic. If treatment is necessary, avoid spraying plants that are in flower, apply in the evening when bees are not foraging, and choose products with lower bee toxicity. Be cautious with nursery plants; some have been treated with systemic insecticides before sale. Ask the nursery if you are unsure.

Make room for native bees to nest

Most native bees nest in bare ground, and many others use hollow stems or old beetle tunnels in dead wood. A tidy lawn mulched edge to edge offers them nowhere to live. Leaving a patch of bare, sunny soil and some standing stems through winter costs nothing and provides nesting habitat.

If You Want to Keep Honeybees

Backyard beekeeping has become popular, in part because of stories like Freeman’s. It can be rewarding, and hobbyists contribute useful data to national surveys. But the data also show that hobbyists often lose colonies at high rates, and poorly managed colonies can become sources of mites and disease for neighboring apiaries.

A few practices separate successful beekeepers from those who restock every spring:

Take a course and join a local club. Beekeeping is a skill learned over several seasons, and local mentors know the forage, weather, and disease patterns of your area.

Monitor mites, don’t guess. The standard method is an alcohol wash or sugar roll of about 300 bees, which gives a count of mites per 100 bees. Many extension programs suggest treatment when counts reach roughly 2 to 3 mites per 100 bees, with lower thresholds in late summer when winter bees are being raised.

Rotate treatments. The amitraz resistance documented in 2025 is a reminder that relying on one miticide invites resistance. Rotating among approved products with different modes of action, and combining them with non-chemical methods such as brood breaks and drone brood removal, keeps treatments effective longer.

Plan for forage. A hive in a food desert will struggle no matter how carefully it is managed. Know what blooms within a couple of miles of your hives across the season.

Check local rules. Many states and cities require registering hives or limit the number of colonies on a residential lot.

What a Celebrity Sanctuary Does and Doesn’t Show

The Freeman story endures online because it is appealing: a famous person using private land to protect a creature in trouble. It also compresses a complicated issue into a single image. The reality is that honeybee colony losses are driven mostly by factors that operate at the scale of an industry, such as mite resistance, migratory pollination, and landscape-level forage loss. A single sanctuary does not change those dynamics.

What large private landholdings can do is provide forage and nesting habitat across many acres, which benefits native pollinators, birds, and other wildlife in the surrounding area. Programs such as the USDA’s conservation cost-share programs help farmers and ranchers establish pollinator habitat on working land, and those efforts, repeated across thousands of properties, matter more than any single celebrity project. The most useful takeaway from the story is not “get bees,” but “plant flowers and leave room for wildlife.”

Where Research and Policy Are Heading

After the 2025 collapse, attention has focused on new tools against Varroa. Researchers are working on several fronts: new miticides with different modes of action; RNA-based treatments designed to target mites or viruses specifically; breeding programs for bees with hygienic behavior that detect and remove mite-infested brood; and better diagnostic tools so beekeepers can detect treatment failure before colonies collapse. Beekeeping groups have also called for faster regulatory review of new mite treatments and for more research funding.

On the habitat side, pollinator-friendly practices are increasingly built into farm conservation programs and highway right-of-way management, and some states restrict certain neonicotinoid uses in consumer products. The debate over neonicotinoids in U.S. agriculture continues, with regulators weighing effects on pollinators against the costs and risks of alternative pest controls.

None of these efforts will return losses to the 15 to 20 percent range quickly. The 2025–26 improvement shows that losses are not on a one-way path upward, but it also shows how far the system remains from sustainable.

Common Myths About Bee Decline

“Einstein said humans would die within four years of bees disappearing.” This quote circulates constantly, but there is no evidence Albert Einstein ever said it. It first appeared decades after his death. The underlying point, that pollinators matter for food, is valid, but the doomsday timeline is not supported; staple grains do not need bees.

“Honeybees are native wildlife that need saving like any endangered species.” Honeybees in the Americas are an introduced, managed species. Their losses are a serious agricultural and economic problem. The conservation problem, in the wildlife sense, is concentrated among native bees.

“Cell phone signals are killing bees.” This theory gained attention during the CCD years but has not been supported by field evidence. The documented drivers are mites, viruses, nutrition, pesticides, and weather.

“Setting up a beehive is the best way to help bees.” Well-managed hives can be rewarding and support local pollination, but for helping bees broadly, planting flowers and protecting habitat do more, and they benefit native species that hives do not.

“Losses are just beekeepers making mistakes.” Management matters, but the 2025 losses hit large, experienced commercial operations hardest. Mite resistance to a standard treatment is not something individual skill can fully overcome.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are honeybees going extinct?

No. Honeybees are a managed species kept by beekeepers worldwide, and colony numbers are maintained by replacing lost colonies. The concern is the high and costly rate of loss, and the separate decline of many wild bee species.

What caused the 2025 honeybee die-off?

USDA scientists found high levels of deformed wing virus and acute bee paralysis virus in sampled bees, spread by Varroa mites that showed resistance to the widely used miticide amitraz. Other stressors such as nutrition, weather, and pesticides may have contributed.

Did Morgan Freeman really turn his ranch into a bee sanctuary?

Yes. In 2014 he described bringing 26 hives from Arkansas to his 124-acre ranch in Charleston, Mississippi, and planting flowering trees and plants for them. He said he was feeding the bees rather than harvesting honey.

Is colony collapse disorder still happening?

Colony collapse disorder, the sudden disappearance of adult bees from otherwise healthy-looking hives that drew attention around 2006 and 2007, is now reported far less often. Current losses are attributed mainly to Varroa and the viruses it spreads, combined with other stressors.

What is the best way for an ordinary person to help bees?

Plant native flowers that bloom across the season, reduce pesticide use, and leave some bare soil and plant stems for native bees to nest in. Those steps help both honeybees and wild bees.

Does buying local honey help?

It supports local beekeepers, who bear the cost of replacing lost colonies. It does not directly help wild bees, but it keeps beekeeping viable in your area.

References

1. Auburn University. U.S. Beekeeping Survey reveals highest honey bee colony losses during 2024–2025. June 2025. auburn.edu
2. Auburn University. U.S. Beekeeping Survey releases annual colony loss estimates, April 2025–April 2026. June 2026. auburn.edu
3. USDA Agricultural Research Service. USDA Researchers Find Viruses from Miticide Resistant Parasitic Mites are Cause of Recent Honey Bee Colony Collapses. June 2, 2025. ars.usda.gov
4. Where the Food Comes From / Project Apis m. Survey Reveals Over 1.1 Million Honey Bee Colonies Lost. February 2025. wherethefoodcomesfrom.com
5. Goulson D, Nicholls E, Botías C, Rotheray EL. Bee declines driven by combined stress from parasites, pesticides, and lack of flowers. Science. 2015;347(6229):1255957. PMID 25721506
6. Koh I, Lonsdorf EV, Williams NM, et al. Modeling the status, trends, and impacts of wild bee abundance in the United States. PNAS. 2016;113(1):140–145. PMID 26699460
7. Klein AM, Vaissière BE, Cane JH, et al. Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 2007;274(1608):303–313. PMID 17164193
8. Potts SG, Biesmeijer JC, Kremen C, et al. Global pollinator declines: trends, impacts and drivers. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 2010;25(6):345–353. PMID 20188434
9. Woodcock BA, Bullock JM, Shore RF, et al. Country-specific effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on honey bees and wild bees. Science. 2017;356(6345):1393–1395. PMID 28663502
10. European Commission. Neonicotinoids. food.ec.europa.eu
11. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Protecting Bees and Other Pollinators from Pesticides. epa.gov
12. WLBT. Morgan Freeman converts his Mississippi ranch into a honeybee sanctuary. March 2019. wlbt.com

Last updated: September 26, 2026