During most honey harvests, Robert Burns said he’s able to pull at least 23 gallons from the honeybee colonies he manages at Mitzvah Garden KC in Overland Park, Kansas.
But these past seasons haven’t been so sweet.
“This is the third year we've lost a lot of the colonies for no good reason,” said Burns, who has been beekeeping for 52 years. “And it's devastating because we have to start completely over again.”
The garden’s five hives were doing well in the spring and summer, but that changed after its most recent honey harvest in mid-August. It was supposed to be the last of the year before leaving the bees alone through the winter.
The bees in one box started to die, according to Burns, while many others began to fly in a sort of death spiral. Days later, almost all of the remaining honeybees – which number in the tens of thousands – died.
In the end, only one box survived.
“I could barely talk that day,” Burns said. “I had to go through and basically clean up the frames, wipe out all the comb, throw it away.”
The number of honeybee colonies across the U.S. might be at an all-time high at nearly 4 million, according to data from the Department of Agriculture. Honey production also grew in 2023.
But in parts of the Midwest, some beekeepers are struggling to keep their bees alive.
“The Midwest can be a really challenging landscape for honeybees and other pollinators,” said Randall Cass, the bee extension specialist at Iowa State University. “We tend to lose our colonies every winter at a higher rate.”
Factors like parasites, exposure to pesticides and a lack of floral diversity can have a significant impact on the ability for bees to survive in the Midwest, he said. And all this can be especially bad when combined with drought or fluctuating temperatures that draw out bees too soon in the winter.
“It just creates a perfect storm of a worst case scenario environment for our bees in some cases,” Cass said.
Iowa often has the highest overwinter losses, he said. Beekeepers in the state sometimes lose more than 40% of their colonies, according to recent research on managed honeybee colonies. Those numbers can be similar in neighboring states, including Nebraska, and parts of Missouri and Kansas, Cass said.
Matthew Lance has been a beekeeper in Nebraska for more than 10 years. He now manages more than 350 colonies across the state. While his hives are largely healthy, he said that parasites like varroa mites and pesticide use are harmful to honeybees.
“They're exceptional at being able to survive in environments that are not very conducive to them,” Lance said. “But it's a death by a thousand cuts. And if every year those cuts get bigger and bigger and bigger, it doesn't take a thousand anymore to kill them.”
Honeybees are not native to North America, but they now play a key role as pollinators in both local ecosystems and the agriculture industry. In the United States alone, about 75% of the fruit, nuts and vegetables the country grows require a bee pollinator, said Tamra Reall, a field specialist in horticulture for the University of Missouri.
“We take insects for granted,” she said. “They can be resilient, but we need to take action and make sure that we're not contributing to the problem, but rather providing an environment for those beneficials.”
Each year, Mitzvah Garden KC harvests nearly 10,000 pounds of fresh produce that gets distributed to food pantries in the Kansas City region. Brenda Ruppel, the farm coordinator, said the okra, squash, apples and pears they harvest are especially reliant on the honeybees.
“There's no doubt about it. Yeah, the pollinators are very important,” she said.
While it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what recently killed the garden’s honeybees, Burns said he suspects it’s due to the nearby use of pesticides, which bees can come in contact with through water sources or nectar and pollen from plants. He also in part blames recent drought conditions.
Because the use of pesticides is prevalent throughout the Midwest – not just in residential use but across the agriculture industry – contamination is widespread, Reall said. Previous research has shown that 90% of pollen samples from beehives in agricultural landscapes are contaminated with more than one pesticide. Reall said the use of pesticides needs to be considered when it comes to pollinator health.
“Pesticides kill insects. And they don't discriminate whether it's beneficial or a pest,” she said.
With colder months ahead, Burns and his team will now have to wait until the spring to repopulate the garden’s hives. Burns raises his own honeybee queens at his home and can start new colonies from his other bees, which he says have remained healthy. This will save the garden from paying hundreds of dollars for new bees, but it could take another year before things are buzzing again.
Although it can be disheartening for beekeepers to lose a colony, Lance in Nebraska said it’s important to remain as resilient as their honeybees.
“To be a beekeeper in the Midwest and the Plains states — it's a very difficult undertaking,” Lance said. “But it's totally worth it.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
