What’s Killing The Bees? A Bee Mogul Confronts The Crisis In His Field

On February 16, 2017, the NY Times ran a full length article in the Business section about the puzzling decline of our honeybee population.  We’ve seen hive loss with our beehives in NJ, but the article’s focus was on large commercial beekeepers who rent their bees to farmers during crop pollination season in what has become a $1 billion+ a year business.  It’s estimated that “of the 100 crops that account for 90 percent of the food eaten around the globe, 71 rely on bee pollination.” “Whatever the reason, in the year that ended in April 2016, 44 percent of the overall commercial bee population died”.   Here’s a link to the NY Times article which sheds more light on this mysterious problem: 

A Bee Mogul Confronts The Crisis In His Field:  Beekeeping on an industrial scale is central to American agriculture, and “colony collapse” has proved to be a severe test.