‘A sickening sight’: Honeybee die-off imperils Minnesota’s honey harvest

In a typical spring, Steve Ellis’s hives would have been buzzing with healthy bee colonies, ready for the honey production season to start in May.

This year, Ellis opened many of his hives to silence and found them hollowed of any sign of life. In his other hives, bee numbers were rapidly dwindling.

Since last summer, Ellis has lost almost 70% of his bees at the Old Mill Honey Company in Barrett, Minn., west of Alexandria.

Ellis’s plight is shared by beekeepers nationwide. Between June 2024 and March 2025, commercial bee keepers lost an average of 62% of their colonies, the largest U.S. die-off on record.

Minnesota is fifth in the country for honey production, home to roughly 1,400 commercial beekeepers and 120,000 bee colonies.

As the state’s beekeepers head into the summer honey harvest period, many are concerned over the financial damages that come with these massive colony losses.

One culprit found to be particularly devastating to honeybees this year: Virus-carrying parasitic mites.

“It’s like if people had a parasite the size of a rabbit, essentially. They’re huge compared to the size of the bees,” said Katie Lee, researcher in entomology at the University of Minnesota. Lee was on the survey team at the nonprofit Project Apis m., where she helped quantify the extent of honeybee loss.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture found that in samples from afflicted colonies, bees displayed alarmingly high levels of viral infections carried by the Varroa destructor mite. Further research found that the vast majority of these mites were resistant to amitraz, a common miticide in commercial beekeeping.

While the USDA study concluded that viruses and Varroa mites were primary contributors to the massive die-off, it acknowledged other stressors. Honeybees’ nutrition plays into their susceptibility to mites, and Cornell University is processing samples to determine the effects of pesticide exposure on bee deaths, she added.

People may not necessarily notice fewer honeybees in their gardens, Lee said. The die-off’s impact is mostly seen by beekeepers for now — it is still too early to tell how the bee loss will affect agriculture pollination, crop yield, and food prices over the next couple of years.

From a distance, even affected bee yards generally look fine, said Mark Sundberg, president of the Minnesota Honey Producers Association. But once beekeepers open their hive covers, the devastation is obvious.

“It’s a sickening sight,” Sundberg said. “We hardly see any signs of bees, and not even dead bees in the hives. We just see a few on the bottom boards, maybe a few scattered out in front of the entrances.”

During the spring, beekeepers usually recuperate from winter colony losses by splitting their colonies into separate hives and waiting for them to grow. The hope is that by prime honey production time in June, each colony will be populous enough to make honey at maximum capacity.

Beekeepers with high losses may have to split their hives into colonies that aren’t big enough to generate much honey, Lee said.

Ellis currently has six hundred hives in his bee yard. He estimates that his yard will produce 25% less honey than average this summer, which amounts to $10,000 to $12,000 of lost income.

When Ellis was busy nursing his colonies back to healthy numbers this spring, he missed out on a big financial opportunity.

Each February, about 80% of U.S. commercial beekeepers congregate in California to pollinate almond orchards. Any other year, Ellis would have joined them with some of his strongest colonies. He would have been paid for his pollination services, and produced another 12,000 pounds of honey in March and April.

Corey Behlke, owner of Homestead Honey Farm in Goodhue County, lost over 2,000 colonies this year, a third of his bees. Despite his relative fortune compared to other beekeepers, he still feels pressure from the dismal state of honeybees nationwide.

“There’s always luck involved in how many of your bees die,” Behlke said. “Input, but also luck.”

It’s still too early to tell how the die-off will affect honey prices — the size of the crop won’t be known until October or November, when production wraps up in commercial bee yards, Sundberg said.

Sundberg is hopeful that Minnesota beekeepers are able to rebuild a significant amount of their colonies this spring and summer. But if rapid die-offs continue next winter, the state’s overall honey production would likely take a hit, Sundberg said.

There’s nothing beekeepers can do once the virus gets into colonies — but controlling mites before bees get infected is crucial to preventing widespread loss, Lee said.

Lee recommends that beekeepers rotate between different types of miticides to slow down the development of resistance in mites. Different treatments can be used at specific times of the year and within certain temperature ranges, she said.

Bees forage for nectar and pollen to feed their colonies back at the hive — a good bee diet depends on the variety and quantity of plants they feed on. The quality of bee forage in Minnesota has declined over the past few decades due to the growth of corn and soybean monoculture, said Sundberg.

Lee encourages people to grow more native plants. According to the University of Minnesota Bee Lab, sunflowers, beebalm, and purple coneflowers are examples of plants that benefit both wild bees and honeybees.

As president of the Pollinator Stewardship Council, an advocacy group, Ellis warns people against pesticide use, especially those containing neonicotinoids. When contaminated pollen is brought to the hive and the queen bee perishes, the entire hive is lost, he said.

“Having both managed honeybees and wild pollinators in a healthier state is in everyone’s best interest, because we all eat, and we all want to have healthy, productive agricultural systems,” he said.