If there’s any animal that can’t seem to catch a break, it’s the honeybee. Thanks to what scientists believe is a combination of disease, parasites, pesticides and other stressors, honeybee colonies have experienced significant losses over the past decade – a phenomenon that’s troubling to say the least, given the insect’s immense importance when it comes to pollinating food crops and other plants. But despite recent efforts to increase protections for the honeybee, new surveys suggest that the insect is still suffering – perhaps now more than ever.

A survey released this week by the Bee Informed Partnership, a collaborative organization of honeybee researchers, revealed that U.S. beekeepers lost 44 percent of their colonies in the past year – the second highest annual loss reported in the past 10 years. Colony “losses” refer to colonies whose bees died from any number of possible reasons, such as disease – they do not necessarily refer to hives stricken by colony collapse disorder, which occurs when a colony’s worker bees suddenly and mysteriously abandon the nest.

Nature's pollinators continue to be threatened by a host of hazards, including pesticides, disease and parasites – and their demise would bode badly for humankind. The Associated Press

YEAR-ROUND MORTALITY

Notably, the survey indicated that bee losses during the summer were just as high as bee losses during the winter – an alarming finding, considering summer is when bees should be at their healthiest.

“The summer is boom time for bees – lots of forage,” said Dennis VanEngelsdorp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland. “We usually think of this as a very good time for bees. When we first started this (survey) 10 years ago, we didn’t even monitor summer losses because we didn’t think this would be significant.”

Altogether, the study surveyed more than 5,700 beekeepers managing nearly 400,000 honeybee colonies across the country. The findings indicated that about 28 percent of managed colonies were lost during both the 2015 summer and the 2015-2016 winter. Because beekeepers tend to add, remove or restore colonies throughout the year, these numbers come out to about a 44 percent loss of all colonies managed between April 2015 and March 2016.

MITES ALSO TO BLAME

A second survey, published Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, suggested that beekeeping operations throughout the country, maintaining five or more colonies at a time, lost anywhere from 12 to 18 percent of their colonies each quarter between January 2015 and this past April.

Scientists believe the losses stem from a variety of different factors, some of which may be more prevalent than others.

“What we think from other surveys is there are three major drivers,” VanEngelsdorp said. “Pesticides, poor nutrition and most importantly parasites.”

In fact, VanEngelsdorp was involved with another recent study which found that Nosema, a disease-causing fungus, and the Varroa mite, a parasite capable of carrying harmful viruses, both remain major problems among honeybee colonies. In particular, the study indicated that Varroa mites may be more prevalent than previous analyses have suggested, with their infestations peaking between August and November.

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