The USDA’s 2015 report on honey producing hives places the number at 2.74 Million, up from around 2.4 million in 2006 and the highest it has been in the past 20 years.
In a WashPo article, reacting to an earlier report in 2015 declared, “Call off the Bee-pocalypse…”
“…the number of honeybee colonies has actually risen since 2006, from 2.4 million to 2.7 million in 2014, according to data tracked by the USDA. The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies — that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers — is now the highest it’s been in 20 years.”
How did the bees survive cataclysmic anthropocentric number fudging warming? The Free Market did it…without the government.
A 2012 working paper by Randal R. Tucker and Walter N. Thurman, a pair of agricultural economists, explains that seasonal die-offs have always been a part of beekeeping,
Colony Collapse Disorder is one of the many episodes PERC has examined over the years, showing how people resolve real problems. Too often it is presumed when reading about environmental issues in the doom-and-gloom media that politicians are needed to save the day. In the case of colony collapse, luckily it never got to political intervention. As is often the case, the uncoordinated market quietly resolved what had been posited as a major crisis.
Bee keepers, looking to keep themselves in business, bought more bees. They divided healthy hives in two and bought a new queen for the second one. The end result? The highest number of active honey-hives in over 20 years–probably because politicians didn’t get involved.
No bee bailouts. No Bee Tzar. No Bee-lieve you can bee more pollination propaganda campaigns leading to bee bills and all the regulations that would be piled on the backs of bee-keepers in the process. The beekeepers fixed it themselves because it was in their own best interest.
And what a great idea? If we try this in other parts of the nation and the economy who knows what we could accomplish.
