The bees of the United States are in trouble and so is their honey. Disease and budget cuts have put bee populations in peril across the country even as honey demand has skyrocketed. The government is also planning on closing an important agricultural research center, risking further loss of both bees and their beloved nectar.
Honey, I shrunk the output
The U.S. demand for honey has grown significantly during the past three decades, mostly due to population growth and “consumers’ association of honey as a ‘superfood,’” said the USDA. However, as more people seek honey, the country is producing less. The U.S. has seen “staggering honeybee colony losses,” said the bee research nonprofit Project Apis m. Between June 2024 and March 2025, 1.6 million colonies were lost, with commercial beekeepers sustaining an average loss of 62%.
There are several reasons for the reduced honey production. The parasitic mite called the varroa destructor has “decimated hives ever since its appearance in the late ’80s,” said Bloomberg. More than 60% of honeybee colonies in the U.S. that died from June 2024 to January 2025 were “infected by mites resistant to the industry’s most widely used pesticide.”
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For the bees that survived the mites, “it’s generally more lucrative for beekeepers to put them to work pollinating crops, rather than dedicating the insects to honeymaking.” As a result of the growing demand and reduced supply, “near-record imports are flowing in to fill that widening gap, with India, Argentina, Brazil and Vietnam emerging as some of the top suppliers.”
A bad place to bee
Alongside the ecological issues, the government is perpetuating the honey dearth. The USDA is planning to close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a “6,500-acre agricultural research station in Maryland that is home to the nation’s premier bee research and disease diagnosis hub,” Jennie L. Durant, a research affiliate in human ecology at the University of California, Davis, said at The Conversation. Beltsville researchers “have helped beekeepers respond to varroa mites” and is now “helping them prepare for a deadlier mite that is infesting honey bees in Asia: Tropilaelaps mercedesae.”
The USDA has claimed that its reason for decommissioning the Beltsville center is that “building maintenance and renovations would cost an estimated $500 million,” said Durant. However, the price, experts argue, is well worth it. “The lab is $3.2 million a year for 20-plus scientists,” Zac Lamas, a researcher at the bee lab within the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, said to The Associated Foreign Press. “We responded to a $600 million problem,” so the “idea that we’re redundant and expensive isn’t a good way to generalize the value of this lab.”
In addition to the Beltsville center, the Trump administration has “proposed eliminating the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area, a move that could defund the USGS Bee Lab, an essential resource for research on native bees,” said Durant. The honey industry “has never been this stretched to keep healthy bees,” Jeff Pettis, who worked as a bee researcher at Beltsville from 1996 to 2016, said to Wisconsin Public Radio. And maintaining bee health is “what Beltsville was all about.”
