[Bonus] BTP Short - 2025 Winter Losses as of Feb 18

[Bonus] BTP Short - 2025 Winter Losses as of Feb 18

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast Shorts, your quick dive into the latest buzz in beekeeping.

Becky Masterman: In 20 minutes or less, we'll bring you one important story, keeping you informed and up-to-date.

Jeff: No fluff, no fillers, just the news you need.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody, welcome to this week's Beekeeping Today Podcast Shorts. Let's get right into it. Today, we've invited our guest, John Miller, who's been with us several times before to talk about the latest news and updates on the losses seen in California on the bee losses. John, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us this morning.

John Miller: Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Becky. It's always a pleasure to circle back with friends.

Jeff: Just for those listeners who may not know who you are, can you give us a quick 15, 20 second bio?

John: Sure, thanks. I spent my beekeeping career as a migratory beekeeper, commercial beekeeper. I've since passed the business on to my son, who's a better beekeeper than I am, so I'm thankful for that. We've just been slogging along for 135 years in multiple generations of the family. It's Miller Honey Farms.

Jeff: You've served in many capacities outside your business in the beekeeping industry as well, correct?

John: I think it's part of our family's DNA of volunteering. Currently, I serve on Project Apis m. as a volunteer board member, and I serve as volunteer president, North Dakota Beekeepers Association. We host a lot of bees in North Dakota in the summer. Hive health issues are really at the front of my mind as we're navigating this difficult season.

Jeff: Yes. Let's get into it because we've talked about this last week in our shorts. That sounds bad, but last week in the short episode, we talked about the colony losses. Can you give us the latest information?

John: Yes, I can. I can share with you what we have. First of all, the losses are nationwide. They don't seem to be confined to any one practice of management or mismanagement or indoors or outdoors or geography. PAM, Project Apis m. was literally volunteered for this survey. I give a lot of respect to the staff at Project Apis m. who did respond quickly. By quickly, in 48 hours, we had a survey out, and we received over 700 responses to this survey. It clearly touched the nerve. Other outfits are thinking about doing a survey, and I wish them well.

I hope one of my goals in this whole thing is for the information to be standardized, so it can be understood, shaped, and figured. Let's just cut to the chase right here. We surveyed hobbyists, sideliners, and commercial beekeepers. In the hobbyists, we find there's 1 to 49 colonies. The median loss rate was 50% with 717 colonies representing 287 beekeepers. The sideliners, 50 to 500 colonies, which is usually where you get some of your very best beekeepers. The mean loss rate is 54%.

Becky: Wow.

John: 28,282 colonies representing 139 beekeepers. The commercial, we win the prize. 62% is the overall loss rate. The astonishing thing for me is we've got 1,094,960 colonies in the survey representing 270 beekeepers. For a total of 702 beekeepers representing 1,123,959 colonies. Those are big numbers.

Becky: I'm just going to get out here and say it because I've been reading about it a lot on posts here and there. A lot of the smaller beekeepers are saying, "It's commercial beekeepers, it's the way they keep bees," it's all of that. We have years and years and years of data showing smaller losses among commercial beekeepers, right, John?

John: We do. For another example, we've got years and years and years of data of bees coming out of sheds where the allegation is, yes, those old bees just die off two weeks later. We don't have-- and my world is indoor storage, we don't see that. There's a couple of things to keep in mind. Feed is not expensive until denied. An indoor building is not a hospital. There are just some foundational facts that the industry needs to confront. Back to survey results, surveys and interviews quickly determined these losses are nationwide and severe. The cause has not yet been identified.

It may be death by a thousand cuts. It may just be an accumulation in the superorganism just could no longer withstand. It might be a viral mutation that the superorganism hasn't seen before, nor have the individuals seen before. The usual causes of loss, including winter management, high levels of parasitic mites, are not currently indicated causes of these losses. That's unlifting the wine from the information gathering. On one point here is Zac Lamas and Jay Evans has been in it. I need to also acknowledge the participation of Elizabeth Hill at USDA's scientific office.

Becky: Jay and Zach are both USDA scientists.

John: We hope that they are also currently employed today. This is also an opportunity for the industry to be heard. To be heard means the industry needs to act. If they care about this, and if they care about their outfits, they need to write a letter, they need to get on the phone and respond to these unfortunate dismissals and bring the plight of beekeeping today to the attention of the congresspersons in their districts. We've got to get off our butt and act.

Becky: John, what you've just done in a very few minutes is report unusually high losses among three groups of beekeepers. Then you've also shared with us that it's the USDA that is stepping in to receive the data that PAM collected via the surveys. They have been the agency and scientists who have helped beekeepers move along and learn about what unusual losses, what makes them happen, and what the causes are.

At the same time, which I just want to spell out for anybody who's not aware of it, at the same time, as our colonies are dying, there have also been some cuts among USDA bee scientists, research technicians, and in all of the labs that we have across the country. I don't know that all of the labs, but I think I've heard about losses in most of the labs as far as employees, correct?

John: Correct. This particular batch of samples, the information went to Beltsville, Maryland ARSB Research Laboratory. The sampling identified parasites, pathogens, and pesticides, the big three involved in the crashes. Chemical exposures were also analyzed, recently presented and are awaiting publication. I know they worked all weekend on this, but it isn't yet ready for publication. The effort to sample, analyze pathogens and circulate economic impacts are well-documented at this 300-mile-long website.

I would say to the industry, stay tuned, especially to the PAM webpage. There will be a public webinar on the 28th of February where I think the data will be presented in a user-friendly manner by Project Apis m.

Jeff: That information would be on the PAM or the Project Apis m. website?

John: Yes, I think it would be on the website, if not today, tomorrow. Things are moving pretty fast right now. Once again, props to the people that stepped up to make this survey really go. To lift a paragraph, there will be a free public webinar for scientists to tell stakeholders what they found so far through PAM, through Project Apis m. on 28th February. Watch for that on PAM social media and website. We've got a few days ahead of us and then we can start getting our head wrapped around this.

If you've just absorbed an 80% loss in your commercial outfit, that mess will follow you the entire year. You just can't dig out of a hole like that in one spring.

Becky: Right. This is definitely threatening operations and this has happened before, correct? You were in the middle of it the first time?

John: Yes, we drove past a very large orchard yesterday. At the time, it was, I don't know, 4,500 colonies was the contract and we'd haul 10 semis in and haul 6 semis of dead stuff back out. Let's see, last month, one of the drivers that we'd known for a number of years, we were off loading bees in the orchard and he says, "What's up with all the bees going east across Nevada?" He says, "There's truckloads of bees going east across Nevada." I'm like, "Jerry, those are dead."

Even up here in the neighborhood, there's a California certified master beekeeper graduate, backyard beekeeper consultant, she lost 60% of her colonies. We look at the frames and we look at, it's like, I don't know what happened here.

Becky: I'm just going to say, it's not the time for everybody to blame each other. It's a really good time to figure out how our industry can get as much support as possible. We're already losing resources with the USDA cuts, so it's a really good time to come together.

John: Thank you so much for jumping on this. I think your timing is remarkable, but you're right. This is no time to start pointing fingers at anyone. It's time really to come together and maybe food security becomes a real thing this year. I don't know.

Jeff: Just real quickly, the breakdown between the three groups of the percentage losses, can we bring it back? The hobbyist, sideliner, and commercial?

John: Let me bring that back because I know I went pretty fast. On the loss category, the hobbyist lost 50%; the sideliners 54%; and the commercial guys, we win 62% losses.

Becky: We don't know-- I mean, that's raw data. It could actually mean the same thing because you've got a huge sample size on the commercial side and a smaller sample size in the other two, just because of the sheer number of the operations.

John: If we round it up, Becky, 270 beekeepers, say they got 300 responses, 270 were usable. Say you got 300, say there's 1,500 commercial beekeepers in America, you actually have an 18%, 20% response rate from the commercial beekeepers, but this is a big number. What you have looking at the data, 270 beekeepers representing almost 1.1 million colonies. There's some really big outfits in there.

Becky: Right. A lot of the country, not everybody, but a lot of us can't even look to see what's going on in our apiaries right now because of the weather. It's going to be biased to those who have access to their bees too.

John: It clearly is like it skews to over 4,000 colonies is the average size outfit on the commercial side. These are the bigger outfits. I know Miller Honey was in. Still, it's like if we had deeper penetration into the beekeeping community, that would be helpful. I think this may be an inflection point.

Jeff: I know that in the past, you've talked to us about your bees in the cold storage for the winters. That has been a whole episode. Do you mind saying how those bees came through this year? Are they part of that 62% as well? Can you provide any insight?

John: Yes, I can. My little universe, because I'm now old and I can't go like I used to, but my little universe is six loads. Whenever you get, whether you're getting six or 16 or 66, you're always on edge looking for that load, that one load that knocks your numbers back. I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it. I'm feeling pretty cocky about this, and I'm sharing lots of numbers with Jason. Then I hit the load. All my flossy numbers got tanked in one day of really not very good bees.

We were loping along within our window, our economic model for pollinating crops and success is about 15% over winter loss. We were loping along right in that sweet spot, a little bit better than that. Then I hit this really lousy load and I became humble again. Because if you learn anything in beekeeping today, you learn humility. [chuckles]

Jeff: Learn that in beekeeping today, not the podcast, but you mean in the general concept of--

John: I mean, both.

[laughter]

Becky: I just have to say, because I think John's been very humble, but I've been out in the yard with a lot of beekeepers and John is amongst the very best beekeepers I've ever been honored to be in a colony with. I've learned a lot from you, especially about Varroa. I think that if you're experiencing these losses, how important it is to keep your bees healthy and fed and queen right and Varroa with less Varroa pressure. I just want beekeepers out there to hear that because you've been very humble in the podcast. If this happens to you, it means that there's something serious going on.

John: Well, thank you. You're very complimentary. I am not a technical beekeeper, but I am an intuitive beekeeper. I think that comes from cracking a lot of covers. I want to circle back on something you said, Varroa. We keep learning more and more about keeping that Varroa level low. Because as I understand it, even two per hundred at the wrong time of year, the viral load echoes through the superorganism for an extended period of time before it sheds. Shed, not in the indoor sense of the word, but shedding from the superorganism.

The presence of the viral load shedding from the superorganism over time. That's what I'm trying to say. You can edit this out because this is just narrative. This is just the world according to John. We are really vigilant about cleaning up in August and September, when a lot of times, we lose the last 10 pounds of the honey crop in North Dakota. Those 10 pounds of honey are the most expensive honey a beekeeper can harvest. Because if the viral loads, if the Varroa is a warren in that winter brood cycle coming off in August and September, that echoes all winter long.

I don't care if you're in the valley or in a shed, if you don't get cleaned up, that viral load just keeps echoing through the organism while it's in a basically dormant state. This is the intuitive part of beekeeping. To me, it makes perfect sense to get your cleanup done and get those mite levels low because the most important bees you hatch all year are the bees that hatch in August and September. That's the end of the world according to John.

Jeff: John, it's been a great pleasure having you on this morning to talk to us about this very important topic. It's evolving, it's changing, and there's a lot of opinions and speculation out there and it's good to have come back and look at the facts. As we know them today, they can change tomorrow as we get more numbers and more data. Thank you for sharing with us this morning and we look forward to having you back.

John: Thanks for having me on.

Becky: Thanks, John.

John: Okay. Thanks. Bye.

[00:19:05] [END OF AUDIO]