In early January, Blake Shook realized that bees were in trouble. Shook, the CEO of a beekeeping site called Desert Creek, is coordinating California’s annual almond pollination, the largest event of such in the world. This incident requires nearly 2 million bee colonies to ship from all over the country to California orchards. But this year, Shook has insufficient contacts. Their bees were all dead.
From June 2024 to February 2025, the United States suffered the worst commercial bee crash. According to a survey of nonprofit projects, an estimated 62% of commercial colonies have died Apis m. When Shook and other beekeepers worked hard to fill the contract, they notified the USDA, which quickly collected samples of pollen, wax, honey and dead bees from Live and Lost Colonies for analysis in five Bee-Research labs across the country. The USDA has long been the country's frontline response to Honeybee's death, using its lab to characterize the threat to insects.
But this year, the Trump administration’s federal funding cuts the action before researchers can reveal what exactly killed the bees. Now scientists, farmers and beekeepers are competing to recover and prevent the next huge death, so late.
The Honeybee colony in the United States has been in a volatile position for nearly two decades. Since the official record in 2007, about 40% of the bee colonies retained by commercial and amateur beekeepers are dead each winter. The breeder still manages to breed new queens by relying on the USDA to quickly determine any given death that causes it to prevent it from happening next year.
Quickly It's a surgical word. Determining which killer (or more likely combination of killers) is the cause of colonial deaths is crucial for beekeepers to restock and adapt to new threats. They need to know whether the bees should be provided with supplemental food or whether the gears should be treated with chemicals to kill specific parasites, viruses, or bacteria. “Until they got the results of the sample they collected, they knew if it was safe to use the device for reconstruction,” Danielle Downey, executive director of the project Apis m. ,tell me.
After a major winter death, the USDA will usually return its verdict in late March or early April, Downey said. But several beekeepers and the American Beekeeping Federation told me they are still waiting for this year’s report. “It’s a little scary,” Russell Heitkam, a commercial beekeeper in Northern California, told me. In addition to publishing reports on deaths in a given year, the agency also provides financial assistance to beekeepers to offset the cost of replacing their stocks with particularly high losses over the years. But Heitkam and Shook both told me that after they applied for funds this year, they received a notice from the USDA farm service agency that they should expect much less than usual. If beekeepers don’t have answers or money before the summer begins, they will miss the rebuilt window.
The Ministry of Agriculture seems to be difficult to return the answer in time. In February, the agency approached Cornell University and asked its bee experts to conduct pesticide testing “due to the layoffs of government personnel and the high costs involved in testing pesticide samples.” The university was able to take on the job because it already had the necessary equipment and due to anonymous donors donated $60,000. Scott McArt, director of program at Cornell's Honey Bee Research Laboratory, told me that he and his team will be close to ending their analysis, but they need to achieve their results through USDA before they can be shared. (The university spokesperson declined to comment further on how to develop a partnership.)
It is unclear to what extent the USDA is able to test any other potential killer due to widespread government cuts. An agent spokesperson told me: “USDA Agricultural Research Services scientists are working closely with federal partners, stakeholders and affected parties to determine the source of this agricultural challenge,” but did not answer my questions about the work. February, The New York Times The agency's Honeybee Labs is in charge of the Agricultural Research Services (among other services), with about 800 employees fired. Before that round of layoffs, each Bee Lab hired 10 to 20 researchers, each with his own high level of expertise. A USDA BEE-LAB researcher said they were fired in February, asking to remain anonymous to protect his job. Some were temporarily rehired and then took administrative leave. The exact scope of layoffs is unclear - as this week, five labs don't have any listings under their website's employee pages - any employee's losses can be debilitating due to the deadline for beekeeper reconstruction methods. Bee pollinating expert John Ternest told me that he suddenly let go in mid-February and was helping to choose which tests to test environmental pollutants to run on the dead colony in USDA's USDA's Stoneville, Mississippi.
Insufficient funding and staffing USDA labs, experts worry that beekeepers won’t know why their colonies died in the next disaster strike. Katie Lee, a bee researcher at the University of Minnesota, told me that the hive plant has risen this year, but Cornell has joined this year, but Katie Lee, a bee researcher at the University of Minnesota, told me that Beekeeper asked the lab outside to be “unsustainable in the long run”. On the one hand, Cornell is one of the few institutions in the country, with equipment to test pesticides from dead colonies. Additionally, the USDA has years of data and good partnerships with beekeepers, universities and nonprofits; non-governmental agencies will struggle to coordinate, communicate and respond on the same scale. Apart from Cornell’s anonymous benefactor, energy-consuming donors have yet to come out of wood products to fund entomology research.
The Department of Agriculture still has valuable weeks to complete the research and allocate funds, and then many American beekeepers are in trouble. At least, the Trump administration has made the work of beekeepers even more complicated in moments of instability. A chaotic year may not articulate the end of the U.S. beekeeping industry, but if the turmoil continues, it will bring real risks. More than 90 commercial crops in the United States are pollinated by bees, including staple foods such as apples and pumpkins. Even a reduction in crop yields, due to the death of Honeybees or the exit of beekeepers, would force the United States to import more agricultural products - with tariffs looming, it is impossible to be cheap.
The responsibility to keep food production stable through the ongoing bee crisis is to put a huge pressure on commercial beekeepers, who run relatively small family businesses. Every year for the past two decades, they have to rebuild from a certain level of massive bee deaths. Keep moving forward and start to feel Sisyphus. "We're seeing a lot of commercial beekeepers exiting the field," said Nathalie Steinhauer, an entomologist at Oregon State University. Many of the beekeepers he works with are now facing bankruptcy. Still, many of them plan to last another year, hoping this winter is a fluorine, federal funding will stabilize, and researchers will somehow figure out what killed their bees so that it won't lower the U.S. food system either.