[smallnamespace]

I'm not sure who your complaint is addressed to, honestly, and I don't see what you would prefer people be doing differently.

It seems like data collection in the US has always been at the colony count + mortality level, which has obvious limitations, such as not looking at the colony health. I'd presume that people are looking at getting better information, but rolling that out will take a lot of time.

OTOH, there are lots of other signs that bees, other pollinators, and many other parts of our ecosystem are under enormous stress. I think we should rightfully be alarmed, not because of the bee's direct effect on us, but because it is also a relatively well-measured bellwether for the status of other natural services that other species provide.

Are you saying we don't have enough data to warrant taking any action, or are you just unhappy at how this is being presented in the media? Note that action also includes finding more data.

[tptacek]

I am objecting to arguing about honeybee population with people who believe that there is a large-scale endangered native apis mellifera population in the US, but can't cite sources backing that (surprising) assertion up.

Any actual statistic I find, I'm sure someone can come up with a Calvinball objection to. I wouldn't mind if those objections came with their own data, but they tend to take the form of "no data is available to support this argument, ergo it should instead be supportable from first-principles reasoning". And then you find out 6 comments into the thread that the assumed first principles include things like "there are gazillions of wild honeybees in the US and they're all dying due to neonicotinoids".