Honeybee colony losses and recent trends.
Losing a colony is never fun, no matter your type of beekeeping or number of hives.
Honeybee populations aren’t just important when it comes to beekeeping; their pollination and biodiversity impacts are crucial to food supplies worldwide. Despite their incredible physical adaptability, honeybee colonies have experienced increasing losses due to various threats like diseases, pests, and parasites (especially the ever-concerning varroa mite), habitat losses and decreased plant foraging resources, and the use of pesticides.
In 2024 and into 2025, there have been reports of a significant increase in colony losses, particularly for commercial beekeepers. See below for more on this.
Because of the increasing dangers of these threats each year, commercial and hobbyist beekeepers alike must face the sadness of a lost honeybee colony. Though it’s a sad reality of beekeeping, understanding the reasons your colony perished can often help expand your beekeeping knowledge and become a better bee-tender to future colonies.
Potential Reasons for Honeybee Colony Losses
As mentioned above, honeybees face many threats that make it very tough for them to survive in our modern world, even with the help and management of a responsible beekeeper*.
*Colony member content.
It can sometimes be difficult to determine the exact cause of colony loss, but common causes of honeybee losses (whether in hobbyist or commercial settings) in the United States include:
Varroa Destructor mites and the diseases they spread to bees. An otherwise healthy colony can be totally devastated by a mite infestation if mite reproduction is left unchecked.
Direct or indirect exposure to pesticides.
Limited foraging resources and habitat loss, due to urban or agricultural land development, monoculture farming, decreased plant biodiversity, and more.
Climate change: more extreme weather patterns with warmer temperatures and increased moisture levels.
Nutritional deficits or starvation caused by a scarcity of valuable sources of pollen and/or nectar.
Check out our in-depth article “What to Feed Honeybee Colonies” to learn more about why and when bees need certain food sources.
Typical Honeybee Colony Loss Statistics
Commercial beekeepers manage honeybee colonies for agricultural purposes, with a huge impact on food supplies worldwide through crop pollination or honey production.
Because commercial beekeepers require many honeybees to offer their agricultural services, they often care for many more colonies (often in multiple bee yard locations) than your typical backyard beekeeper. These organizations often manage many thousands of colonies.
Through necessity, the care and treatment regimens of commercial beekeepers are radically different from those practiced by hobbyist beekeepers. As such, direct comparisons between the two should be heavily qualified.
To hobbyist beekeepers, many of whom start the cold weather months with 1 or 2 colonies, the thought of losing 50% of those colonies is quite devastating. With proper planning, IPM practices, and good recordkeeping, though, most hobbyists don’t have an average colony loss quite that high.
Unfortunately for commercial beekeepers, though, the devastation is both emotional and financial. Despite the industry’s best efforts, it is still common for commercial operators to average losing nearly half of their colonies annually, most of which die during the winter months.
Though PerfectBee’s resources are more applicable to backyard beekeepers than commercial operators, we look to understand and recognize the importance of their beekeeping practices and impacts on the beekeeping industry.
During PerfectBee’s recent Colony Cluster live event in March 2025, our PerfectBee Ambassadors and Colony members discussed these devastating losses and concerns for potential impacts, especially to hobbyist beekeepers.*
*Colony member content. Couldn’t join us live? Don’t worry! Colony Members can listen to this discussion, as well as all the topics covered during March’s Cluster discussion, via the recording page here.
Why 2025’s Commercial Losses Are Different
The number of colonies lost across all types of beekeepers has steadily increased in past years. However, 2024 and the first months of 2025 brought alarming reports that surpass historical trends. These are concerning to honeybee scientists and researchers across the country. Initial early-season reports from commercial beekeepers reveal potentially catastrophic levels of losses, already averaging losses of 62% of their total colony count, and some with even more than that.
The beekeeping season has barely begun for 2025, and already nearly 1.1 million colonies have been reported as lost, according to a recent survey by Project Apis m (learn more here). Though it’s still early in the season and commercial beekeepers are reporting most of the losses, hobbyist and “sideliner” beekeeping operations are already noting increased losses, too.
What are the consequences of these losses?
A wide variety of crops, including almonds, blueberries, potatoes, and even alfalfa grown for livestock consumption, depend on pollination from honeybees and, therefore, will certainly be impacted by increased colony losses. Because they have the potential to be so widespread and with long-term effects, there are likely to be economic consequences to beekeepers, farmers, and consumers.
Though a definitive cause has not yet been found to understand why losses are so substantial this year, research is ongoing, and efforts are focused on understanding the data to help mitigate risks to honeybee colonies in the future.
Even hobbyist beekeepers could be directly impacted by these losses, even if they don’t lose colonies themselves. Keep in mind that if you’re purchasing bees to install this spring, your honeybee package and/or nucleus colony supplier could be affected by increased colony losses, too. This may affect the availability, pricing, and pickup date for your new colony.
Want to learn more about this difficult but important topic? Head here: The Value in Reviewing Losses