[wodenokoto]

Thank you for the insights.

Are there any numbers comparing colony collapse between normal and organic beehives?

I imagine that bees used for producing organic honey will have access to greater variety of plants, since their immediate surroundings doesn't contain pesticides, which obviously also lowers their exposure to pesticides.

I'm aware that bees used for organic honey travels outside their designated organic habitat, but all things equal, they should be better of with regard to the 1st and 3rd factor of colony collapse, than non-organic bees.

[roel_v]

Thing is, there is no such thing as the colony collapse. Some colonies just disappear (abscond) and we don't know why, others are weak and don't survive winter, others are so heavily infested with varroa destructor that too many bees get deformed wing virus and fizzles out, ... It's a combination of things, which is what makes it so difficult to nail down. Furthermore, there are many more factors that make it hard to compare apples to apples (how many colonies in the area? How much forage? Weather? Disease vectors present? Etc...)

There are some monitoted experiments (google 'bond experiment' for example) but they cannot be used for 1:1 comparisons to say what is 'better'. Plus, what is 'organic'? Technically (legally), it's following Demeter standards, but who can fulfill those? Does that mean that all those others are 'non-organic'? No, there's a very wide range left.

And even more... What are the goals of the beekeeper? No commercial apiary can survive with 5 kg/year yield per hive. Should commercial honey production go away? Leaving aside the animal welfare aspect, I think there's room for a range of approaches, but it needs to be balanced. Of course, balanced by whom, that's the question...