Every January, a procession unlike anything else in American agriculture rolls across the highways of the western United States. Flatbed trucks carrying wooden stacks of beehives — sometimes hundreds of thousands of colonies in a single convoy — make their way toward California's Central Valley, where the world's almond orchards are about to bloom. It is the largest annual managed pollination event on earth: roughly 80 percent of the world's almond supply grows in California, and every single almond requires bee pollination. For a few critical weeks each year, the fates of a $6 billion industry and the country's beekeeping sector are inseparably linked.
In January 2025, the beekeepers making that journey started noticing something wrong. The losses they found when they opened their hives were unlike anything in their experience — not the seasonal attrition that commercial beekeepers budget for, not the elevated-but-manageable losses of recent years, but a wholesale collapse affecting operation after operation across the country. By the time the full accounting was done, the numbers were stark: commercial beekeepers across the United States had lost an average of 62 percent of their colonies between June 2024 and March 2025, according to surveys by Project Apis m. and the Honey Bee Health Coalition, covering operations representing 72 percent of the nation's commercial colonies. A broader national survey by Auburn University and the Apiary Inspectors of America put the overall annual loss rate — across all scales of beekeeping — at 55.6 percent, the highest since systematic tracking began in 2010, and the second consecutive year of record losses.
In California alone, lost pollination contracts have been estimated at $428 million. The USDA puts direct industry losses — pollination income, honey production, and colony replacement costs — at roughly $600 million nationwide, before counting what happens downstream when the crops those bees were supposed to fertilize come up short.
For most people, a bad year for beekeepers sounds like a story for the agricultural pages. It isn't. To understand why, you have to understand what pollinators actually do — and what the food system looks like without them.
What Pollinators Actually Do
Bees pollinate by accident. When a honeybee visits a flower to collect nectar or pollen, it brushes against the flower's anthers, picks up pollen grains on the fine hairs covering its body, and carries those grains to the next flower it visits. In doing so, it enables the fertilization that produces seeds and fruit. The bee isn't trying to help the plant — it's trying to feed itself and its colony. The plants, over millions of years of co-evolution, have developed flowers, colors, scents, and nectar rewards specifically to attract and reward bees for this inadvertent service.
The numbers that result from this relationship are staggering. Bees are responsible for the pollination of over 100 commercial fruit, nut, and vegetable crops in the United States alone, according to USDA research. Globally, insect pollinators — primarily bees, but also butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, and wasps — contribute to approximately 35 percent of world food production by value. The Honey Bee Health Coalition estimates the contribution of honeybees alone to U.S. crop production at roughly $17 billion annually. The oft-cited figure that pollinators are responsible for "one in three bites of food" specifically describes this: the nutrient-dense, flavor-diverse portion of the human diet — the fruits, vegetables, nuts, and oils — that depends on insect fertilization.
What pollinators don't cover matters as much as what they do. The world's staple caloric crops — wheat, rice, and corn — are wind-pollinated and don't need bees. This means a catastrophic pollinator collapse would not cause mass starvation in the immediate term: cereal yields would continue. What it would do is strip the dietary diversity and nutritional richness from the global food supply. It would make almonds, avocados, blueberries, apples, cherries, cucumbers, melons, and dozens of other crops dramatically more expensive, geographically limited, or outright unavailable at scale. Public health authorities worldwide have spent decades trying to get populations to eat more of precisely these foods. A sustained pollinator decline would make that guidance increasingly difficult to follow regardless of individual intent.
What Killed the Colonies — and Why the Answer Is Complicated
When commercial beekeepers started reporting the January 2025 die-offs, the USDA's Agricultural Research Service moved quickly. Researchers collected bee and colony samples from six large commercial beekeeping operations in California and other western states, analyzing them for parasites, pathogens, and other stressors. The findings, published in a paper now under peer review, pointed clearly to one primary driver: Varroa destructor mites that had developed resistance to amitraz, the pesticide that commercial beekeepers have relied on for mite control since the 1990s.
Varroa destructor is not a new problem. The mite — a parasitic organism that feeds on the fat bodies of developing and adult bees, weakening their immune systems and shortening their lifespans — arrived in the United States in the late 1980s and has been the single greatest threat to managed honeybee colonies ever since. For decades, beekeepers controlled it with a rotating toolkit of miticides: coumaphos and tau-fluvalinate first, then amitraz as the mite populations developed resistance to those earlier treatments. What USDA researchers found in the 2025 collapse samples was that the rotation had run out of runway: virtually every Varroa mite collected from the collapsed colonies tested positive for a genetic marker conferring resistance to amitraz.
But the mite resistance was, in the words of researchers at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, only part of the story. What Varroa carries is as dangerous as the mite itself. The 2025 USDA samples found high levels of two viruses — Deformed Wing Virus and Acute Bee Paralysis Virus — in affected hives. Both are transmitted by Varroa mites feeding on developing bees, and both are associated with colony mortality. The resistant mites weren't just parasitizing the colonies; they were introducing viral loads that the colonies' immune systems, already compromised by the mite feeding itself, couldn't clear.
The peer-reviewed survey published in Science of the Total Environment in November 2025, drawing on data from over half the nation's managed colonies, added important nuance. It found that losses didn't significantly differ between beekeepers who used amitraz and those who didn't — suggesting that resistance to the treatment had spread widely enough that having it on hand no longer provided meaningful protection. One commercial beekeeper, quoted in industry publications, described losing colonies that had been treated "by the book" and colonies that hadn't been treated at all at nearly identical rates, which is exactly what total resistance to a miticide looks like in practice.
Researchers also noted that Varroa resistance alone is unlikely to be the complete explanation. Poor nutrition — driven by habitat loss that reduces the diversity of pollen available to colonies — weakens bee immune systems in ways that make viral infections more lethal. Pesticide exposure, particularly from neonicotinoids applied to crops that bees subsequently forage on, has documented immunosuppressive effects. Climate-driven shifts in flowering times create periods of forage scarcity, particularly in the fall, that push colonies into winter in a weakened state. The current scientific consensus is that Varroa resistance and the viruses it enables were the acute trigger of the 2025 collapse, but that chronic background stressors made the colonies far less able to withstand it.
The Wider Picture: Beyond Managed Honeybees
Honeybees dominate this conversation for practical reasons — they're economically central, they're managed in concentrated populations that are easy to count, and their losses generate industry survey data that makes the scale of the problem visible. But they're not the whole pollinator story, and in some ways focusing on them obscures the larger ecological picture.
There are more than 20,000 species of wild bees globally, around 4,000 of which are native to North America. These native species — bumblebees, mason bees, sweat bees, leafcutter bees, and hundreds of others — don't live in managed colonies. They can't be trucked to almond orchards. They pollinate wild plants, regional crops, and the agricultural ecosystems that managed honeybees can't reach or don't efficiently cover. And they're declining, often for the same reasons as honeybees but with far less monitoring and almost no policy support.
Multiple bumblebee species that were common across the eastern and midwestern United States within living memory have seen catastrophic range contractions. The rusty patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis), once found across 28 states, is now federally listed as endangered after losing roughly 87 percent of its historical range in less than two decades. The American bumble bee (Bombus pensylvanicus), once among the continent's most abundant species, is now considered potentially extirpated in several northeastern states. Recent research published in PNAS confirmed that at least one additional bumblebee species — the Franklin bumblebee — shows the genetic signatures of a population that has been in serious decline for centuries and may now be functionally extinct.
Butterflies and moths tell a parallel story. The eastern monarch butterfly population declined by an estimated 80 percent over recent decades before partial recovery efforts stabilized it at a fraction of its historical numbers. Long-term monitoring networks across North America and Europe have documented widespread declines in butterfly and moth abundance — declines that matter not just for the species themselves but for the web of plants that depend on them for pollination.
A 2026 analysis by researchers studying plant-pollinator networks in northern latitudes, published in PNAS, found that climate change is already increasing the secondary extinction risk for plants — meaning the risk that a plant species disappears not because its own habitat becomes unsuitable but because the specific pollinator it depends on disappears first. As flowering times shift earlier in spring and bees emerge on schedules set by temperature patterns that are themselves shifting, the timing mismatches that have historically been the exception are becoming more common.
One statistic captures the breadth of the problem: current estimates suggest that roughly one in five North American pollinator species is at risk of extinction. That's not a fringe concern confined to a handful of charismatic species. It's a warning about the structural integrity of the ecosystems that food production depends on.
Why This Is a Food Security Story, Not Just a Conservation One
The framing of pollinator decline as primarily an environmental or conservation issue — something that matters for biodiversity and ecological health but doesn't directly threaten human welfare — has been slow to change. The 2025 honeybee collapse accelerated that change, because the economic consequences were immediate enough to make the food-system implications concrete.
Almonds are the most visible pressure point because of their complete dependence on managed bee pollination and the concentrated geography of production. California grows over 80 percent of the world's almonds, and almond orchards require more than two million bee colonies each year for effective pollination — a number that represents the majority of all commercial colonies in the United States. When 62 percent of commercial colonies don't survive to almond season, the ripple effects run through every segment of the industry: beekeepers who can't fulfill pollination contracts, growers facing incomplete pollination and reduced yields, processors managing variable supply, and ultimately consumers paying higher prices for a product whose production just became dramatically more precarious.
The broader agricultural exposure extends far beyond almonds. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts that depend on insect pollination account for the majority of the value in the American produce aisle, even if they account for a minority of total caloric production. Blueberries, cherries, apples, squash, cucumbers, melons, avocados, coffee — the list of high-value crops with significant or total dependence on bee pollination is long. The USDA estimates insect pollination contributes $15 billion annually to U.S. crop production value. Globally, the figure from international research organizations is in the range of $190 billion per year.
There's also a nutritional equity dimension that rarely makes headlines. When pollinator-dependent foods become more expensive due to supply constraints, the price increase falls disproportionately on lower-income households that already spend a higher share of income on food. The foods that public health guidance most consistently recommends — fruits, vegetables, nuts — become less affordable precisely as the ecological systems that produce them become less reliable.
What the Response Looks Like — and What It Doesn't
The 2025 collapse triggered a coordinated response that was faster and more substantive than the industry's previous reactions to elevated losses. The USDA's Agricultural Research Service accelerated work on alternative miticides and resistance management protocols. Researchers at Washington State University, in collaboration with Belgian company Apix Biosciences, have been testing an artificial "power pollen" containing the nutrient isofucosterol that has shown promise in improving colony health in trials. The USGS published a ten-year Pollinator Science Strategy in June 2025, outlining a research agenda through 2035 focused on species monitoring, stressor assessment, and habitat restoration guidance. Legislative proposals under the Saving America's Pollinators Act have authorized funding — $3 million annually through 2026, rising to $4 million through 2030 — for habitat programs and the establishment of a Center for Pollinator Conservation within the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
These are real responses. But researchers and industry groups have been careful to note that they don't yet add up to a solution. The most urgent problem — the loss of amitraz efficacy and the lack of a replacement miticide with comparable effectiveness — doesn't have an approved solution. Research on promising alternatives like DIDS (a voltage-gated chloride channel blocker showing early efficacy in lab trials) is ongoing but not yet at the stage of commercial availability. Resistance management, which would involve rotating between multiple effective treatments to slow the development of resistance, requires multiple effective treatments to rotate between — which is precisely what the current situation lacks.
Habitat restoration efforts, meanwhile, are promising at small scales but face a fundamental coordination problem: wildflower strips on individual farms don't necessarily translate to meaningful landscape-scale forage networks if the surrounding land remains monoculture. Research published in the journal Restoration Ecology in 2025, studying pollinator plantings in the intensively farmed Midwest, found that floral resource diversity — the number of different flowering species present — was a stronger predictor of bee community health than the total area of planted habitat, suggesting that the kind of restoration matters as much as the scale.
For home gardeners and small landowners, the practical implications are clear even when the policy landscape remains unsettled. Planting a diversity of native, regionally appropriate flowering species that bloom across the full growing season — rather than a monoculture of ornamentals that flower simultaneously and then offer nothing — provides the floral diversity that both managed and wild pollinators need. Leaving areas of bare or loosely packed soil undisturbed supports the roughly 70 percent of North American bee species that nest in the ground rather than in hollow cavities. Avoiding pesticide use during peak bloom periods, and choosing targeted treatments over broad-spectrum applications when treatment is truly necessary, reduces the chronic background stress load that makes acute stressors like Varroa resistance so much more lethal than they would otherwise be.
None of this will single-handedly reverse a national decline driven by decades of habitat loss and pesticide accumulation. But the margin that managed and wild pollinators are currently running on is thin enough that every contribution to widening it matters. The open question hanging over this growing season — and every one that follows — is whether the scale and urgency of the policy and research response can outpace the speed at which the tools beekeepers have relied on are failing. The 2025 collapse may be the clearest signal yet that the answer to that question cannot wait any longer.
Have you taken steps to support pollinators in your garden or community? Share your experience in the comments below.