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No, There’s No Wild Bee-pocalypse, Either!

November 9, 2019

“Did you catch the story about the swarm of 25,000 bees that had to be captured and removed (by a special police unit, no less) from the Staten Island Ferry Station in New York City?, asks Henry I. Miller, M.D., in an editorial in Issues & Insights.

“After many years of media reports about honeybees and wild bees dying off, you’d think they were nearly extinct — so what were 25,000 of them doing at a ferry terminal in one of the world’s most densely populated cities?

“Maybe they heard that New York was “all the buzz.”

“Seriously, as I will explain, wild bee populations, like their honeybee cousins, are not endangered …

“The declines observed in individual wild bee species have been ascribed to three causes: disease, habitat loss and climate change — not pesticides (including neonics) …

“There is further evidence that the “wild bee decline” narrative is just as flawed as the earlier “honeybee-pocalypse” claims. Evidence from studies in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands indicate that populations of particular wild bee species once considered to be in decline are now rebounding; at least up to a certain point, it appears that changing conditions can reverse adverse trajectories for wild bee populations.

Click here for the full editorial.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, Calif. He was founding director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter at @henryimiller.

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