If you look at the model in equations (2), (3) and (4), you can see that they force fit the decrease in population of the bees on the neonicotinoid exposure. Because the decrease of the population in this model is only linked to pesticides, you need a very careful analysis of the confidence intervals and the quality of the fit or you can fall into the spurious correlation trap[1].

Also "The authors acknowledge that their study finds an association and doesn't prove a cause and effect link between the use of neonicotinoids and the decline of bee populations.". Which is good, it means they know the limits of this study.

The other case is that around 2005, we had a shift to produce more biofuels by doing more extensive single crop farming. This also had devastating effect on the biodiversity needed for the bees, insects and the birds.

The last point is, why bees are going very well in Australia even so Australia is the most extensive user of neonics?

The issues with bees is really a hard problem, most likely a combination of many factors, so I do not want people to jump on a single factor (the neonics) then claim victory and move to other things even so neonics are most likely not the main factor.

This year was bad for our bees, 8 hives, just 1kg honey per hive...

[0]: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160816/ncomms12459/pdf/nco... [1]: http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=1597

Like you say, pesticide use alone is unlikely to be the issue - hell DDT and friends are far less friendly to insects, and we're used far longer - so it's likely a whole host of anthrogenic factors which are wiping out the bees, much like many other species.

We're pretty much the worst thing since the cambrian-ordovician extinction event for biodiversity.

No amount of biosecurity can defeat threats that travel on the wind.

Well we know since the introduction of Neonicotinoids in the US the honey bee colonies numbers are down from about 3.5M to just above 2.5M. I do believe the good news is that the largest drop was from 90-96 (3.5M to 2.5M) and then a steady decline until 2012 (~2.35M) and since then a steady uptick back to just above 2.5M.

My understanding is that CCD is not a disease at all, but more likely is a symptom, and that symptom is associated with neonicotinoids as concluded by this study and others before it.

I can't really speak to Australia, or other countries where the total numbers might be up since the introduction. However, lets acknowledge bees, especially wild bees, are difficult to inventory. Looking at the US data, we know managed colony decline started simultaneously with the introduction of Neonicotinoids and the largest decline was in the first 6 years followed by slow steady decline for 12 more years and then the more recent slow but steady increase since 2012.

Here in the US we have thousands of honey bee species, we really don't even bother identifying/naming them all, and there are about 5x the number of species globally. It really isn't far fetched to conclude certain species were susceptible to effects of Neonicotinoids and others are resistant, such is a story we see in nature regularly. Everyone's favorite example is the Panama Disease[1] that wiped out the dominate commercial banana on a global scale, leading to the resistant banana species we see in the store today, and now of course new strains of the Panama Disease are threatening the modern commercial bananas (which some experts guess will be extinct in 5 years).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease

1. Very low toxicity to mammals. Neonics are used in flea collars, and to kill lice in farm animal bedding materials for this reason. Neonoics are also very safe to apply by human applicators.

2. Neonics are systemic pesticides in plants. They are absorbed into the plant and provide long term protection against insects pests. Less pesticide drift, less danger to applicators, BUT it also gets into floral nectar, causing problems for bees and possibly other insect pollinators.

3. Neonics are cheap. I can buy 5lbs of Marathon 1G, a neonic pesiticde for about $80. Something more targeted, such as Rycar is more than $500 for a similar quantity, and Rycar is not systemic, it has to be applied several times.

There is a move towards more targeted pesticides such as Rycar, Floramite, Kontos, etc. but they are expensive, and in many cases more difficult to use. That's the darn problem. Neonics are terrible for bees, but for agriculture, they are really useful and there is no clear replacement.

:P

I'm sure there won't be any negative consequences ;)

* There is no evidence of neonics disrupting food webs or destroying ecosystems. How do you even "destroy" an ecosystem? that doesn't make any sense, at least with an ecologist's definition of "ecosystem."

There has also been a coevolutonary arms race between plants and insect pests going back millions of years and many plants contains chemicals many times worse than any pesticide used on crops.

Easy. Wiping the key groups, like top predators or pollinators

In any case, destroying is not the right verb here, "changing" the ecosystem would be a better fit. Often for worse.

> There is no evidence of neonics disrupting food webs

There's plenty of evidence. This article is just one more. No wild bees and other pollinators -> no apples, plums, peaches, pears, onions, lattice, pumpkins, carrots, peas, peanuts, caffe, honey... I think that this qualifies as a case of "food web in trouble".

> Most of the food crops we depend on both directly and indirectly are grasses and are wind pollinated (corn, wheat, etc.)

Yes human diet is mostly based in cereals. The problem is that a lot of areas in N of Europe, Russia USA or South America aren't suitable to temperate or tropical cereals like corn or rice, because weather. Thus they need either spend gas for bringing cereals to the population, or rely on potatoes, apples, cabbages and other crops that stand frost and short summers. The 'big' cereals can be also difficult in desertic or high mountain areas, because they need a lot of water and soil is too poor. Legumes and other desertic crops (fruit tree cacti for example) are awesome in this cases. If you use all the water in culturing lattice, the wild organisms suffer obviously.

I can find sources for you with commercial beekeepers pollinating canola crops seed-treated with neonicotinoids seeing no change in their colony survival at all.

Also, your argument would be a bit stronger if canola wasn't the crop referred to in the study the BBC post is talking about.

It's a known issue that colonies cannot survive long term on substitutes. Why this is isn't clearly known yet but the assumption is that they are missing some dietary analogue to vitamin C.

In fact: the idea that bee colonies would be stressed by a diet solely of oil rape nectar (note: no commercial bee colonies have such a diet, because they're moved around to take advantage of growing seasons elsewhere) favors my argument: it's another way in which bees working canola crops should do far worse, given neonic exposure, than they actually do.

Well, the BBC article plus several studies it links to are some sources to start with. Right?

This article deals with non-honey or bumble bee species so it is not attempting to make any assertions about a neonic-honeybee health link.

The Swedish Board of Agriculture recently released a systematic review of scientific literature [0].

Bumblebees are more sensitive to subletal effects of neonicotinoids than honey bees [1][2]. There's a great variation in sociality, seasonality and living for various species of bees, which means the effects of neonicotinoids will vary between species [3][4][5].

A big issue is also that most studies only look for residue of neonicotinoids in plants or in the bee to figure out how calamitous they are. Even though many of the most used neonicotinoids have a high LD50 in bees [6], there are very few studies that look at the effects of the bees of the exposure. Instead of just looking at the individual level, more studies are needed that look at effects on sub-individual, hive and population level.

In rapeseed, there has been negative effects on the growth and reproduction of the bumblebee Bombus Terrestris linked to neonicotinoids [7][8]. And in [8] they also showed that Osmia Bicornis failed to create hives by rapeseed fields where clothianidin were used, but in average created 2.88 hives by non-treated fields.

--- [0] http://www.jordbruksverket.se/download/18.1a3130fb152332440f...

[1] Cresswell JE, Page CJ, Uygun MB, Holmbergh M, Li Y et al. (2012b) Differential sensitivity of honey bees and bumble bees to a dietary insecticide (imidacloprid). Zoology 115: 365-371.

[2] Cutler GC, Scott-Dupree CD (2014) A field study examining the effects of exposure to neonicotinoid seed-treated corn on commercial bumble bee colonies. Ecotoxicology 23: 1755-1763.

[3] Thompson HM, Hunt LV (1999) Extrapolating from honeybees to bumblebees in pesticide risk assessment. Ecotoxicology 8: 147-166.

[4] Williams NM, Crone EE, Minckley RL, Packer L, Potts SG (2010) Ecological and life-history traits predict bee species responses to environmental disturbances. Biological Conservation 143: 2280-2291.

[5] Brittain C, Potts SG (2011) The potential impacts of insecticides on the life-history traits of bees and the consequences for pollination. Basic and Applied Ecology 12: 321-331.

[6] LD50 for imidacloprid, thiamethoxam and clothianidin for the honey bee Apis Mellifera is 0.02-0.08 μg per bee. For acetamiprid and thiacloprid it's 8.1-39 μg per bee. EFSA 2012.

[7] Goulson D (2015) Neonicotinoids impact bumblebee colony fitness in the field; a reanalysis of the UK’s Food & Environment Research Agency 2012 experiment. PeerJ 3: e854.

[8] Rundlöf M, Andersson GK, Bommarco R, Fries I, Hederström V et al. (2015) Seed coating with a neonicotinoid insecticide negatively affects wild bees. Nature 521: 77-80.

There are three broad approaches to killing insects.

#1. Mechanically disrupt them. E.g., rip their heads off or squish them or similar. This may seem impractical at first, bringing to mind images of immigrant laborers crouching over the crops with magnifying glasses, identifying the bad insects and crushing them between thumb and forefinger.

That would indeed be impractical. The way you implement #1 is to find another insect that preys upon the pest insect, or that is a fatal parasite to the pest insect.

This can be a very safe method for dealing with the pest insect, because predator and parasite species are often very specific when it comes to their prey or hosts, often only going after a single species.

So why don't we use this method more? I'll cover that later.

#2. Disrupt their life processes chemically by using a pesticide that attacks some fundamental aspect of life.

This is risky and hard to get right, because most of the fundamental aspects of life that insects depend on are also the fundamental aspects of life that other life forms depend on. This means those pesticides are almost always harmful to far more species than just the pest you are trying to get rid of.

Insects are small, so you can sometimes work around most of the danger to other species by keeping the doses small enough so that they are huge in insects, but are small in other animals that eat the poisoned insects, or in animals and people that eat the crops that that the residue lingers on.

You can also try to design the pesticide so that it breaks down quickly. Insect lives are often on regular and predictable schedules, so for many species there will only be a short, predictable time when they are attacking crops. In that case, a pesticide only needs to stay effective for that time frame.

#3. Disrupt their life cycles chemically by using something that only affects the particular species that you wish to get rid of.

This is actually feasible! Insect behavior is essentially controlled by biological state machines, and state transitions are triggered and controlled by hormones. Suppose you've got a pest insect that hatches at a certain time of year, then spends a couple months living in the ground eating grubs, then on the first warm evening of summer emerges, finds a pond, and then swarms 2 to 3 meters above the north side of the pond, swarming until it finds a mate in the swarm, mates, and then lays eggs on your crop plants and then dies, and when the eggs hatch the larva eat the crops.

Each of those events will be controlled by a hormone. There will be a hormone that triggers the "leave the ground and fly to find a pond" behavior. Another will trigger the "find the north side of the pond" behavior. Yet another will invoke the "swarm at 2 to 3 meters" action, and the "find a mate action" after that. After the mating, another hormone will trigger the "lost in time, like tears...in...rain. Time to die" behavior in the males, and the "lay eggs and die" behavior in the females.

If you can make a synthetic version of that hormone that triggers the the start of the sequence, and expose the insects to it a few weeks before that first warm evening of summer, you can make them do everything early. If that is early enough that they have not yet become sexually matured, they will go through the motions, but nothing useful (from the insect point of view) will happen. You'll have effectively wiped out that whole generation in that area.

But what happens to other insects that get exposed to that hormone? Won't we also be triggering bees and other useful insects into doing things out of sequence? Nope! It turns out that hormones from one species generally don't affect other species, nor do they affect non-insects that might eat the insects.

So why do we do #2 instead of #3? The same reason we rarely do #1.

We rarely do #1 and #3 because to do them requires actually understanding the pest insect. If you want to bring in a predator or parasite for a pest insect, you need to know enough about the natural ecosystem of the pest to identify its predators and parasites, and understand their effects on it.

Similar for #3. Someone has to study the life cycle of the pest sufficiently to reverse engineer its behavior state machine to identify the behaviors that we'd like to fiddle with, and study the pest sufficiently to identify which hormone controls that behavior.

From what I understand, these studies aren't particularly easy. Someone may have to spend many years studying a particular insect to understand it enough to start hacking it's biological programming. The big pesticide companies aren't particularly interested, because #2 is a lot easier...that just takes formulating new chemicals that are generally hostile to life, and then figuring out what restrictions have to be placed on their use to kill insects without doing too much collateral damage.

Academic researchers don't do much for #1 or #3 either, because there just isn't the funding.

There is a good illustration of this in the book "Life on a Little Known Planet: A Biologist's View of Insects and Their World" by Howard Ensign Evans. He was one of the world's leading experts on parasitic wasps. Before reading his book, I did not even know that there were parasitic wasps, but in fact there are many species of them, most very tiny (head of a pin size).

He tells of an incident where there was an invasive pest, from Florida if I recall correctly, that was attacking California citrus crops. In Florida there was another insect that was either a predator of or a parasite of (I forget which) the pest. This was imported in an attempt to control the pest.

This attempt failed, and California's citrus crop suffered large losses. Many years later, researchers figured out why the imported predator/parasite did not work. It turned out that the predator/parasite species turned out to actually be two species. According to everything that scientists had observed and measured at the time, they appeared to be one species, but it turned out to be two closely related species. There were only a couple of observable differences, both subtle. One was something like one species mated slightly earlier than the other. That was easy to miss, because unless you've watched a lot of them mating, you won't be able to tell the difference between two populations whose mating windows overlap, and one population with a wider mating window. Unfortunately the other difference was that only one of the two was a predator/parasite to the California pest. All of the ones they collected to send to California were from the wrong population.

I believe (but don't recall for certain) that this predator/parasite species was a parasitic wasp. The reason no one had studied it enough to realize that it was two species was that in the US there were only two parasitic wasp experts, and they were busy with the thousands of other parasitic wasp species.

(There are a lot of species science has not gotten around to studying, or even cataloging. Evans mentions early in the book that every summer he'd set out an insect trap on his property in New England, and would routinely catch insects that were unknown in the scientific literature. He would even occasionally catch parasitic wasp species that he did not recognize).

Why were there only two parasitic wasp experts? Evans mentions that he had a promising graduate student who was interested in specializing in parasitic wasps, and Evans advised the student to find another specialty. Industry was not interested in hiring parasitic wasp experts, and universities entomology departments weren't growing so the only way he'd get an academic position as a parasitic wasp expert was to replace an existing retiring expert, and neither Evans nor the other US parasitic wasp expert were anywhere near retiring.

Personally, I find this ridiculous. Pest insects cause a tremendous amount of economic damage. Methods #1 and #3 are effective and environmentally safe ways to control them. I would think it would be well worth our while to fund anyone who is interested and willing to make a career out of studying the ecology of pest insects and of predator/parasite insects that might affect pest insects. Even if most do not lead to controlling pest insects, some would, and that should justify the cost.

As far as I have been able to find, no one keeps track of how many entomologists there are, but the Entomological Society of America has about 7000 members. If every member of the ESA was an expert in a dozen species, they would still not come close to covering all the species that are probably economically relevant in the United States.

When I was growing up in fly-over land, we had small, harmless little ladybug beetles. The most benign of all the flying insects in the territory. Then some how an aphid that attacks soy bean plants got imported from Asia, no one knows how for certain. It attacks the stems of the plants and destroys their ability to transport moisture through the stem. Pretty devastating to the plant.

So Very Wise People imported an Asian ladybug to feed on the aphids. Very large in comparison to the native species. And they bite. And they leave dirt trails when they come into the house. They have helped mitigate the aphid problem, but the native species is pretty much gone now. And the Asian ladybugs move into your house for the winter and invade everywhere and leave their dirt everywhere. And bite.

So, net result: One destructive, invasive species somewhat tamped down, but farmers still spray insecticides for it when it gets out of hand (based on population measurements in growing bean fields). One native species wiped from the ecosystem and replaced with a nastier and more populous non-native species. Net it all out: 2 for the invaders, 0 for the home team.

There aren't really any simplistic answers. Chemicals aren't great for the non-target species (including the farmers that apply them), but imported predators have unanticipated side-effects as well. Not growing soybeans anymore is an option, I suppose, but not so great either.

I think the key is to understand very well the insects you are trying to control, and the insects you consider using to control them. Sometimes you can find a predator/parasite that only attacks the pest insect and cannot survive without it. That should usually be pretty safe, because as the pest is eradicated the control insect will die off too.

If you use a control insect that attacks multiple species, or that has a way of surviving absent the target insect, then introducing the control insect can be quite risky.

The more resources we put to understanding insects, the more we can get the good outcomes and avoid the bad.

As a side note I am wondering about there only being two parasitic wasp experts in the US, that must have been a long time ago.

My brother in law, who is one of the world's top parasitic wasp experts (based on papers published and scientific awards) has been working with US parasitic wasp experts for decades. He never mentioned this shortage of US scientists in this field.

"Life on a Little Known Planet" was first published in 1968, which fits in with that. The latest edition was revised and updated in 1993, which was still quite a while ago.

I don't recall for sure, but I believe the passage that mentioned only two parasitic wasp experts in the US was talking about the time when his graduate student was interested in specializing in that area, which could have been any time before he retired.

(I can't check because unfortunately I have it as an audio book. Great for listening in the car, but terrible for searching to find and reread a particular passage!)

(Before we colonized this place, there were no wild honeybees: they're an introduced species).

Honeybees are livestock, not wildlife.

They can't be domesticated, and containing them after they swarm involves tricking the bees into thinking they are the ones making a decision (you can turn their hive 90 degrees after they swarm in summer and they will return in most cases, assuming they've found a new spot for a hive).

Also, mites (and foul brood) are still a pain in the ass and I can see why bees need a beekeeper to even stand a chance.

In 1989-1990 US honey Bee colonies were at about 3.5M. Neonicotinoids were introduced in the 1990's and since then the US Bee colonies declined to an all time low in 2012 (below 2.5M colonies). Since 2012 there was a small but steady uptick to just above 2.5M colonies; however, that is still down 1M and nearly 33% total since the introduction of Neonicotinoids.

In fact, the biggest decline was from 1990-1996 when the number basically dropped from 3.5M to 2.5M. My understanding is Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) wasn't even acknowledged by the Government until 2006, which is odd because the decrease from 1996-2006 may have only been 2.5M to ~2.35M. Then again in 2006 our Government was championing the strength and stability of the housing market, so maybe they are just not the most proficient at interpreting numbers and data.

As to wild/ferral honey bees, they may be endangered but I assure you they do exist in the US. In fact my parents just has a wild hive removed from their property resulting in 80lbs of honey (including the comb). You can check out Willy the Bee Man, he runs the largest wild bee removal business in South Florida and his website includes some videos of the removals.

Nevertheless, your position is bee colonies have increased since the introduction of Neonicotinoids, which again may be true globally and in specific areas like Canada which you cite, but US data shows that is not true and we are at a net negative 1M (managed) colonies since their introduction.

Whether or not that is coincidence is beyond my point, as I said we know the mites have had a devastating impact on honey bees in the US, so we are left with the question why would the trend have reversed course (in the US) if entirely attributable to the mites? At least there is a theory I am aware of for the colonies reversing course despite the continued use of Neonicotinoids.

Moreover, there are studies that suggest of the 4,000 honey bee species in the US, only some were susceptible to Neonicotinoids while other species resistant, hence the major decline in the first 6 years since the introduction of Neonicotinoids and a slow taper off over the next 12 years until those susceptible species are gone leaving the resistant species which are now growing.

All things being equal, if the decline were solely attributable to mites, then what is your take on the US pattern for the initial huge decline followed by a slow decline and then the recent turn around? I know there has been some genetic modifications of both the mites and bees to address the issue, but that is more recent and wouldn't explain the big taper off in decline from 1996-2008 and it is not like they have been eradicated.

Specifically, I acknowledge the devastating impact of the mites, but believe because the patterns (I am aware of) suggest more.

I am thoroughly interested in the global data if it suggests the U.S. Honey Production Survey data is an anomaly in terms of net negative colonies after introduction Neonicotinoids.

I know approximately fuck-all about beekeeping. It should not be this easy for me to rebut arguments about neonic toxicity, but I appear to be holding my own on approximately 3 Google searches per day.

I am not a beekeeper either but for a time I did sell honey, up to 65,000 units per order and so I am familiar with USDA annual reports and USDA Honey Production Survey.

In fairness I seem to be one of the only people in the thread not challenging you about the impact of the mites; however, USDA reports has guided my limits on the losses attributed to mites. Not to provoke you but the Honey Production Survey shows colony growth from 1987 when you say the mites were introduced until 1990, thereafter the numbers began declining sharply.

>Now, look up the introduction and adoption dates for neonicotinoids.

By all accounts I see development in late 80's and adoption in early 90's, coinciding with the time period honey bee (managed) colonies saw nearly 33% decline, but essentially during the same period as mites were introduced sans those few years of growth after the introduction of the mites.

Just so you understand where I am coming from the USDA 2015 annual attributes under 20% of loses to mites, and only 5% to pesticides, but 15% to "other" and over 20% (more the mites) to unknown.

Maybe my Google skills are subpar, but I could not find a straight forward graph of honey bee colony number by year for Canada or globally, which is readily available with a US bee population by year Google Search. What I did see is Canada territories in 2008 on the low end losing 20% of colonies and 48% on the high end (but 1 year snap shot is not helpful), and this year a 3.8% growth which they said was record growth over the last decade. I eventually found a standalone statement that Canadian Government which attributed the majority of loses to mites, which supports what you are saying, whereas the USDA 2015 report attributes only 20% of loses to mites and 40% between pesticides/other/unknown.

Neonics aren't the reason varrao mites wiped out feral honeybees. The timeline for that argument just doesn't work.

The number of honeybee colonies in the US (where honeybees are livestock, not an indigenous species) is up since the announcement of CCD in 2006. Colonies are down since around 1990, when wild honeybees were wiped out by the varroa mite --- which mites remain the biggest stressor of honeybee colonies in the US.

I'm guessing that's not your assertion. But, of course, the argument you appear to be making is just as invalid.

Similarly if you are making honey. If you have the right to make honey over an area that will support 100 beehives but you know that 20 of them are going to die, ten you will put in 120 beehives.

Commercial beekeepers know how to create new colonies by artificially triggering the split/swarming process. Thus, the logical response of commercial beekeepers to the colony collapse disorder is to keep extra colonies around. It makes complete sense.

Unfortunately, I doubt a similar adaptation is happening in the wild. We are losing wild pollinators and that may have all kinds of negative effects on the ecosystem.

Page 10

“Long-term population trends for the honey bee, the most important managed pollinator, are demonstrably downward.”

The varroa mite literally wiped out the feral honeybee population in the US. There are no more North American feral honeybees! Of course the long-term population trend is downward!

Bee populations have been demonstrably stressed for a very long time, and CCD and other more recent developments are yet another sign.

The need for beekeepers to aggressively split hives is a sign that things are going very badly for them, even if we manage to raise the number of colonies in the short term.

Note that there are plenty of other parts of our ecosystem that show signs of severe stress as well (e.g. amphibians, coral reefs, etc.); we may very well reach a tipping point where large swaths of various food chains catastrophically collapse.

The 2006 date cited for CCD isn't the government acknowledging CCD. It's the first published reports of CCD in commercial colonies. It's not a giant conspiracy.

It's also worth knowing that overwintering losses stabilized after 2006, and commercial populations hit record numbers afterwards.

Clearly, there are bee stressors other than "colony collapse disorder". But beepocolypse advocates use the term "CCD" as a cudgel in any discussion about stressors or population losses. No, can't do that.

I don't need perfect data. Any data will do.

Honeybee populations have not stabilized, although it is true that wintering losses have stabilized a lot in the last several years. Summer losses have been horrible in a worrying way, and we just don't understand why - this was unheard of in decades past. CCD specifically has been observed less in recent years but overall annual losses are not stabilizing and are far higher than economically acceptable. My data is from the USDA.

The overall message is that something (not all varroa) is still changing things now, and we don't quite understand it yet. Yes, the introduction of neonics also corresponds heavily to the worst of the varroa period and that should be taken into account. It doesn't mean varroa explains away every other problem.

The linked BBC article is only about non-honeybee species.

It seems like data collection in the US has always been at the colony count + mortality level, which has obvious limitations, such as not looking at the colony health. I'd presume that people are looking at getting better information, but rolling that out will take a lot of time.

OTOH, there are lots of other signs that bees, other pollinators, and many other parts of our ecosystem are under enormous stress. I think we should rightfully be alarmed, not because of the bee's direct effect on us, but because it is also a relatively well-measured bellwether for the status of other natural services that other species provide.

Are you saying we don't have enough data to warrant taking any action, or are you just unhappy at how this is being presented in the media? Note that action also includes finding more data.

Any actual statistic I find, I'm sure someone can come up with a Calvinball objection to. I wouldn't mind if those objections came with their own data, but they tend to take the form of "no data is available to support this argument, ergo it should instead be supportable from first-principles reasoning". And then you find out 6 comments into the thread that the assumed first principles include things like "there are gazillions of wild honeybees in the US and they're all dying due to neonicotinoids".

That is, since bee populations are on the rise, neonics are not harmful to them.

You could just as easily draw the conclusion that neonics are helping bees.

Neither conclusion is valid.

Regardless, a better metric to consider re: managed hives might be annual colony losses, not total quantity of active hives. Of course beekeepers can make new hives. Thus far they are thankfully able to keep up with higher and higher losses each year (and honey and pollination prices are continuing to rise as more energy and money is put into raising bees instead of bee products).

This spike in losses is more recent than the varroa introduction. Graphing out one positive metric and pretending things haven't gone weird with honeybees in the past decade or so seems misguided.

There are some feral honey bees colonies.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/28290890

Now how about the 'total hives' vs 'annual losses' issue? I think the metric you've chosen to indicate overall honeybee health is lacking.

Overwinter losses are probably around your number for the last several years but all-year losses are much higher. The USDA stated for 2013-2014, for example, higher summer losses than winter for the first time, for an annual total of 42.1% *

Regardless of the exact number, my point is still valid in discussing your original question.

[*] http://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2015/...

I've read this in an article when I was 11 years old. The problem, as in most cases, are the humans. Some days I am wishing for a huge ecological disruption, famine and another Spanish flu to wipe 50-70% of the globe, even though I know I too might be one to go in such an event.

In fact, that is what the Gates Foundation is expecting to be a coin-flip scenario in their lifetime, which is what, the next 20 years or so! So yeah, prepping in a WW2 bunker with broadband internet and half a year of supplies in the mountains doesn't sound so crazy after all. When shit hits the fan, shoot on sight and salt the meat.

Hell, even the EPA and Dept of Agriculture conducted a massive study and said it's pretty far down the list of factors in the decline of the honey bee population.

[1]http://www.usda.gov/documents/ReportHoneyBeeHealth.pdf