If you have signed a pollination contract to provide 100 beehives for a commercial orchard and your colonies keep dying then in order to be sure you can perform your contract and not incur damages, you will make sure you have more than 100 beehives in order to allow for colony collapse.
Similarly if you are making honey. If you have the right to make honey over an area that will support 100 beehives but you know that 20 of them are going to die, ten you will put in 120 beehives.
Commercial beekeepers know how to create new colonies by artificially triggering the split/swarming process. Thus, the logical response of commercial beekeepers to the colony collapse disorder is to keep extra colonies around. It makes complete sense.
Unfortunately, I doubt a similar adaptation is happening in the wild. We are losing wild pollinators and that may have all kinds of negative effects on the ecosystem.
Active colonies != total bee population.
If the mortality rate is high, then you need more colonies with reproducing bees in them to maintain the population at a certain level.
Cite the whole context of that quote! They're referring to trends since the 1940s.
The varroa mite literally wiped out the feral honeybee population in the US. There are no more North American feral honeybees! Of course the long-term population trend is downward!
I'm not an academic researcher so I don't have the raw data that you want, but I think it's worth not missing the forest for the trees.
Bee populations have been demonstrably stressed for a very long time, and CCD and other more recent developments are yet another sign.
The need for beekeepers to aggressively split hives is a sign that things are going very badly for them, even if we manage to raise the number of colonies in the short term.
Note that there are plenty of other parts of our ecosystem that show signs of severe stress as well (e.g. amphibians, coral reefs, etc.); we may very well reach a tipping point where large swaths of various food chains catastrophically collapse.
I'm sorry, but respectfully, you've provided neither forest nor trees. I'm not an academic researcher either, but I feel as if I'm one of the few people on this thread that has heard of a varroa mite, or knows apis mellifera's actual role in the North American ecosystem. All I did was look stuff up. Can't everyone else do the same thing?
The 2006 date cited for CCD isn't the government acknowledging CCD. It's the first published reports of CCD in commercial colonies. It's not a giant conspiracy.
It's also worth knowing that overwintering losses stabilized after 2006, and commercial populations hit record numbers afterwards.
Clearly, there are bee stressors other than "colony collapse disorder". But beepocolypse advocates use the term "CCD" as a cudgel in any discussion about stressors or population losses. No, can't do that.
Similarly if you are making honey. If you have the right to make honey over an area that will support 100 beehives but you know that 20 of them are going to die, ten you will put in 120 beehives.
Commercial beekeepers know how to create new colonies by artificially triggering the split/swarming process. Thus, the logical response of commercial beekeepers to the colony collapse disorder is to keep extra colonies around. It makes complete sense.
Unfortunately, I doubt a similar adaptation is happening in the wild. We are losing wild pollinators and that may have all kinds of negative effects on the ecosystem.