The 2025 Commercial Beekeeping Colony Loss Crisis: Why Professionals Lost 62%
In January 2025, commercial beekeepers across the United States started reporting something that shouldn't have been possible. The professionals - the ones with the resources, the experience, the best equipment - were watching their operations collapse at rates that exceeded anything hobbyists were experiencing.
By February, the numbers told a stark story: commercial beekeepers lost an average of 62% of their colonies between June 2024 and February 2025. Hobbyists with fewer than 50 hives lost 50%. Sideline operations managing 50-500 colonies lost 54%.
The pattern had reversed.
The Professionals Usually Lose Less
Here's what makes this crisis unusual. For the first 15 years of national colony loss surveys - from 2007 through 2022 - commercial beekeepers consistently reported lower losses than smaller operations. The data showed a clear trend: more colonies meant better survival rates.
The reasons made sense. Commercial beekeepers monitor mite levels more aggressively. They replace queens systematically. They have the capital to invest in preventive treatments and the scale to absorb research costs. A hobbyist might check for varroa mites when they remember. A commercial operation with 2,000 hives builds monitoring into weekly schedules.
The Pacific Northwest Honey Bee Survey documented this pattern over 12 years: backyard beekeepers averaged nearly 40% losses while commercial operations averaged 21%. The University of Delaware's bee health research showed similar patterns nationwide. Scale provided resilience.
Until it didn't.
When the Pattern Broke
The 2023-2024 winter losses marked the first reversal. For the first time since monitoring began, commercial beekeepers reported higher winter losses than backyard operations. The industry noted it as unusual but not yet alarming.
Then came the 2024-2025 season.
The Auburn University survey - which captured data from 2,453 beekeepers managing approximately 8.4% of US honey-producing colonies - recorded an annual loss rate of 55.6%. The highest since surveying began in 2010. Winter losses alone hit 40.2%, exceeding all historical averages including the previous record of 37.7% from 2018-2019.
But the Project Apis m. survey, launched in response to emergency reports from commercial beekeepers preparing for almond pollination, revealed something more specific. Between June 2024 and February 2025, the beekeepers managing the nation's largest operations - the ones moving thousands of hives to California orchards, the ones supplying pollination services that underpin American agriculture - lost 62% of their colonies.
Some operations reported losses approaching 100%.
The survey collected data from 842 beekeepers managing approximately 1.956 million colonies, roughly 72% of the nation's bees. The economic impact exceeded $600 million in direct colony losses, lost pollination income, and replacement costs. The almond industry alone faced an estimated $428 million in damages related to pollination contracts.
What Changed
The USDA Agricultural Research Service analyzed samples from 114 colonies across California and western states in February 2025, focusing on both failing and surviving hives. They found high levels of Deformed Wing Virus A and B, plus Acute Bee Paralysis Virus, in all sampled bees exhibiting behavior known to precede death by minutes or hours.
The viruses weren't new. Varroa destructor mites have vectored these pathogens since spreading across the US in the 1980s and 90s. Commercial beekeepers have managed varroa pressure for decades using chemical treatments, primarily amitraz.
But every varroa mite collected from affected colonies tested positive for a genetic marker linked to amitraz resistance.
The treatment that commercial operations relied on - the one they could deploy at scale, the one integrated into standard protocols - had stopped working. And when mite populations escaped chemical control, viral loads exploded.
Lewis Bartlett, assistant professor at the University of Georgia and program lead of the UGA Bee Program, described the mechanism: "Our honey bees have been struggling for decades as the Varroa mite acts like a 'bee tick', injuring the bees by feeding on them, but more importantly, spreading diseases - including damaging viruses. Beekeepers have fewer and fewer options to control Varroa mites as the parasite has evolved to become resistant to most of the chemicals we once used."
The 2021 Honey Bee Health Coalition guide to varroa mite controls for commercial beekeeping operations had warned about this scenario. The continuous use of off-label amitraz, with increasing dosages as effectiveness declined, would eventually render the chemical useless - just as coumaphos and tau-fluvalinate had become largely ineffective before it.
Commercial beekeepers, with their larger operations and higher treatment costs, had the strongest incentive to maximize amitraz's utility. That same scale accelerated resistance development.
Why Hobbyists Survived Better
The reversal suggests something about the vulnerability that comes with standardization. Commercial operations, by necessity, use similar treatment protocols. When those protocols fail, they fail across large segments of the industry simultaneously.
Hobbyist beekeepers use more varied approaches. Some treat aggressively, some minimally, some not at all. Some monitor monthly, some never. Some rely on organic acids, some on synthetic chemicals, some on mechanical interventions like drone brood removal. The inconsistency that typically produces higher average losses may have provided accidental protection when the standard commercial protocol failed.
The Auburn survey noted that nearly all commercial beekeepers replace old queens with new ones during summer, while only about half of backyard beekeepers do. Queen management affects colony resilience, but it also represents another point where commercial standardization creates systemic risk. When the standard practice assumes effective mite control, and mite control fails, the entire system experiences stress simultaneously.
The Almond Problem
California's 1.4 million bearing almond acres require approximately 2.8 million honeybee colonies for pollination each February. That represents virtually every managed colony in the United States. The 2025 almond bloom occurred while beekeepers were discovering 62% losses.
Almond pollination generates consistent revenue that many commercial beekeepers depend on. A colony rented for almond pollination earns approximately $181. Pollination services now represent a larger income source than honey production for most commercial operations, a shift driven by expanding almond acreage between 1988 and the present.
The timing creates specific vulnerability. Bees must be ready in February, leaving no opportunity for beekeepers to split healthy colonies and rebuild numbers after winter losses. Growers typically sign pollination contracts in fall, months before anyone knows which colonies will survive winter. When losses exceeded 60%, many contracts couldn't be fulfilled.
Steve Godlin, a Tulare County beekeeper who retired in fall 2024 after 50 years in the business, watched his operation decline through the season. His hives were heavy with bees in September 2024. By October, "we started seeing a couple of loads going downhill." November brought hives left with just a cup or two of bees and a queen, with dead bees on the ground.
"My brother Paul and I sold the bees, sold the trucks, sold all the comb, all the supers and anything bee related before Thanksgiving," he said.
The hive value - including the cost of the hive itself, lost pollination income, future honey crop, and the ability to split for next season - ranges between $350-$500 per hive. Godlin lost 136 hives to theft that fall, representing approximately $55,000. California beekeepers have experienced an 87% increase in hive thefts since 2013, with losses estimated at more than $3.5 million. When live bees become scarce, dead equipment becomes valuable.
What Doesn't Fully Explain It
The USDA research identified viruses and amitraz-resistant mites as primary contributors, but acknowledged that other stressors - pesticide exposure, poor nutrition, environmental conditions - likely exacerbated losses.
The summer of 2024 brought extreme heat to parts of California. Weather affects forage availability and bloom timing. Drought conditions appeared in some regions, though major honey-producing states like North Dakota and South Dakota showed mostly clear conditions on the July 30, 2024 drought monitor.
Some beekeepers adopted indoor "shed" storage for winter, a practice that showed promise in earlier trials. The 2024-2025 crisis affected both indoor and outdoor-stored colonies, suggesting that while storage methods matter, they couldn't compensate for the viral and parasitic pressure.
Nutrition matters. Bees need diverse pollen sources across the season. Agricultural intensification reduces floral diversity. But nutritional stress has been building for years without producing losses at this scale.
The pattern suggests a threshold effect. Multiple stressors remained manageable as long as mite control worked. When that single tool failed, everything else became amplifying factors.
The Acceptable Loss Creep
The Auburn survey noted something subtle in how beekeepers perceive losses. In early years of the survey, beekeepers considered 15% annual losses acceptable. By 2025, that number had crept to 23%.
Nate Steinhauer, a survey contributor, observed: "The level of acceptable loss, which was originally around 15% in earlier years of the survey, has crept up to 23% this year. So that tells us beekeepers are thinking about those factors that affect honey bee health more actively."
Or it tells us that sustained high losses recalibrate expectations. When 40% losses become routine, 23% starts looking manageable. The industry has normalized crisis-level mortality.
The 2024-2025 losses - 62% for commercial operations - exceed even these adjusted expectations by nearly threefold.
What Comes Next
The Honey Bee Health Coalition released an updated version of its Tools for Varroa Management guide in 2025. Development of alternative miticides becomes urgent. Research into viral treatments accelerates. Some operations are exploring whether honey bees can develop tolerance to varroa through selective breeding, though this represents a multi-year project.
The immediate challenge involves rebuilding colony numbers before the next almond bloom. Commercial beekeepers typically split strong colonies in spring to replace winter losses, but 2025 left few strong colonies to split. Some operations won't rebuild. Godlin's retirement represents one data point in what may become a broader trend - experienced beekeepers exiting an industry where the fundamental tools no longer work reliably.
Zac Browning, fourth-generation commercial beekeeper and board chairman of Project Apis m., stated: "Honey bees are the backbone of our food system, pollinating the crops that feed our nation. If we continue to see losses at this rate, we simply won't be able to sustain current food production. The industry must look inward and outward for solutions to chronic bee health failure."
By August 2025, the situation remained critical. The crisis revealed that professional expertise and operational scale provide limited protection when the parasites evolve faster than the treatments. The reversal - professionals losing more than hobbyists - suggests that standardized solutions create standardized vulnerabilities.
The varroa mite arrived in the United States in 1987. Nearly four decades later, it has rendered successive treatments ineffective through resistance development. The pattern will likely continue with whatever chemical replaces amitraz unless the industry develops genuinely different approaches to mite management.
The alternative is continuing to accept 40-60% annual losses as normal. Which means it isn't beekeeping anymore. It's continuous colony replacement, with pollination services squeezed between cycles of die-off and desperate rebuilding.
That's not sustainable. But it's been the reality for nearly two decades. The 2024-2025 crisis just made the unsustainability impossible to ignore.