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Tuesday, August 08, 2017

Treehugger Tuesday

From Mother Nature Network:

Finally, a Little Good News for American Honeybees
August 4, 2017
Russell McLendon

American beekeepers have spent a decade struggling with colony collapse disorder (CCD), which causes bees to mysteriously abandon their hives. CCD has raised concerns not just for beekeepers, but for farmers of all stripes — plus anyone who eats their crops. U.S. honeybees pollinate about $15 billion worth of crops per year, which provide a quarter of all food eaten nationwide.

It comes as welcome news, then, that the number of domesticated U.S. honeybee hives has risen so far in 2017, according to a new survey from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). There were 2.89 million commercial honeybee colonies in the U.S. as of April 1, 2017, the USDA reports this week, a rise of 3 percent from a year earlier.

About 84,000 U.S. hives fell victim to CCD in the first quarter of 2017, compared with 116,000 from the same period in 2016 — a one-year improvement of 27 percent. And from April to June of this year, beekeepers lost 35,000 hives to CCD, also down 27 percent from the nearly 48,000 collapsed hives reported between April and June of 2016.

Read the entire article here.

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