The article notes that the keepers worst hit are the bigger commercial operations. A major argument is that they tried to industrialize beekeeping like the rest of agriculture, feeding them crap and constantly moving them, except it's a lot easier for bees to say screw you I'm going home.
If your home moves constantly, it's only going to be so long before you can't remember where you live and you take a wrong way home.
Bee colonies are fragile. If the bees so much as 'sense' a disease, seeing the bodies doesn't matter specificly because an infected bee generally leaves the colony to die, there can become a mass exodus as they may believe there's disease in the actual colony. This presents a problem if you're continually losing your bees due to moving your colony, because if you get unlucky you could trigger an exodus.
What's more bee's follow a small oligarchy, each of which hold the ability to trigger a swarm. Let's call these 'Simon's' because they're the ones who relay the queen's orders. So what happens when the bee's believe Simon says 'leave' because he went missing? These oligarchs have the ability to trigger a swarm to found a new colony, so losing these few key bees is truly dangerous for a colony.
It sounds rather trivial, but these few bees can control a huge portion of a hive's population. These are the bees a hive needs to retain, just as much as the queen, but they cannot be contained like a queen (IE regular size not fat and need to leave the hive to trigger natural behaviours like gathering). The even bigger problem is that these bees cannot found a new colony, as all the females aren't sexually mature.
Another problem is that a new queen has a mating flight, often multiples. These queens are born to replace the existing queen, which if this queen gets lost (because some moron human moved the hive 50km) it will found a new hive instead of taking over the existing hive. This means if there isn't enough time to prepare, the hive can literally die off because it's incapable of preparing a new queen in time (it takes ~3 weeks from the egg being laid to the mating flights).
Bees are an agrarian society, and if the towns keep moving the farmers will never find it. The problems are really as complex as the questions as to why a town becomes abandoned, so really it's amazingly complicated and we as humans are screwing around with it.
Solution: The best solution is likely to maintain static hives on farmland instead of relying on mobile hives. It may be less cost-effective, however it is likely much more sustainable. I know if I was a farmer, I'd be trying to provide support for my own bee hives to form.
As the article says, two years ago the entire Florida orange industry used virtually zero pesticides, it is currently a major exception that they are using pesticides due to a disease outbreak.
When it is an exception, you wouldn't be having year-on-year problems of colony collapses.
However you are right for most crops. However pesticides are not the problem, it's how they're used which is the problem. No pesticide should be used when the crop is flowering and it requires pollination, this is just flat-out common sense which is being ignored by the farming industry.
The problem is that farmers are opting for a lower maintenance cost at a major increased risk of full-out crop failure. However, with government subsidise to support farms that have catastrophic crop failures there is little incentive for the farmers to change their practices.
Example: It would be like everyone using candles and oil lamps to light their houses and when a fire eventually starts by one and burns down a town house complex, the government steps in and pays everyone to rebuild their houses. No one is going to stop using the candles and oil lamps until their houses stop being rebuilt for them. This is what happens for many farmers globally. Most of the US farm subsidies goes directly to supporting farmers with failed crops, a fair whack likely of which were caused by improper pesticide usage.
Pesticides can be applied directly to the soil to destroy grubs and mites. They can then be applied during the leafing stages of the plant growth to kill off butterflies and such laying eggs that become caterpillars and such. Next it can be pollinated a month to a few days (for a fast acting pesticide) before the crop flowers. Finally you can pesticide again once the pollination is complete.
The biggest problem with pesticides is that certain varieties infect the food (the pesticide grain size is equal to a pollen grain, so it attaches to the bee and works its way into their food supply). These pesticides can be dangerous for months to bees, but more dangerously can prevent new workers and drones from being born and can kill the hive by attrition.
Static hives for a responsible farmer is the ideal. The farmers would then know more about their crops as a whole by knowing more about the pollinators that support them. It really is a common sense approach, a farmer should know the most about their crops than anyone else and the honeybee is an integral part of their crops in the quantities they want to grow.
I meant in the short term, however I didn't state that. You're right though, creating a low-maintenance hive (IE one you only have to harvest every few months) would drastically increase long-term profitability. Having to drive around to harvest the honey would likely increase costs on a company, but they'd be at much less risk.
Virtually every farmer has major incentives to keep their own bee hives, they'd be travelling their fields frequently enough to harvest the honey so they would stand to benefit the most for the least of expense.
I wonder, if we keep moving bees around this way shouldn't the problem eventually go away, because of evolution. Of course I have no idea of long something like that would take.
Bee populations have continued a precipitous decline since 2006, dropping 32% in 2007, 36% in 2008, and 29% in 2009. This not only effects honey but also the $15 billion in crops depending on pollination by bees. The phenominon is called “colony collapse disorder” in is happening all over the world. The cause is probably a result from many factors and increased use of pesticides is likely a major cause. Pesticide use has increased significantly in the last few years in places like Florida to fight a plant disease hitting the orange crops.
The article notes that the keepers worst hit are the bigger commercial operations. A major argument is that they tried to industrialize beekeeping like the rest of agriculture, feeding them crap and constantly moving them, except it's a lot easier for bees to say screw you I'm going home.