Talk:Bee population decline

Revision suggestions
Hi ! This is a good start and it is obvious the amount of work you have put toward this article's development. The article can be approved by removing unnecessary phrasing, such as the first sentence of Potential Causes. There are several sentences that start with dependent clauses (Although... Through..). Work to convert some of these to more direct, independent statements to make the article more interesting. Finally, I notice there are two lists of references - were all these used for this article? Be sure to include those citations. Best wishes BCarmichael (talk) 19:23, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

The Australia Evidence
Mention should have been made about the lack of either bee decline or colony collapse disorder in Australia which has none of the bee decline problems yet uses neonicotinoids just as much as the rest of the world. This casts serious doubts that pesticides of any kind have an important part in bee decline. Oldfart (talk) 12:45, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Effects of Decline
I am worried about this paragraph. The claim of bee colonies dropping between 1945 and 2005 seems to be global. However, the reference just refers to bee hives in the USA. According to other sources - such as http://www.science20.com/news_articles/near_20year_high_beepocalypse_postponed_again_until_2017-169496 - the high number of managed bee hives in the USA at the end of WW2 was because they were bred for the war effort, as bees wax was used in munitions. See the link for more details.

The drop in numbers seems to be because they were no longer needed for the war effort. This is not mentioned in the article. All the causes the article says may be causes seem much less important, if we are comparing numbers in 1945 to numbers in 2005. Pity - I liked their links.

The claim of bee colonies dropping between 1945 and 2005 seems to be the only claim to bee numbers dropping which has a link to support it. However, in this case the claim made from the link seems a misleading oversimplification without explaining that how bee numbers were greatly increased during WW2 to help in munitions production. I think we need better sources to support this page's main assumption. Holland jon (talk) 21:07, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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Clarification/Merge?
According to the UN's FAO database, global bee populations have been steadily increasing for at least the last 50 years. The Colony collapse disorder page agrees: "according to U.N. FAO data, the world's beehive stock rose from around 50 million in 1961 to around 83 million in 2014, which is about 1.3% average annual growth. Average annual growth has accelerated to 1.9% since 2009.". Turns out it's only in the US and Europe that there's been a decline (and Europe is primarily due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and other economic factors), and I note all the references in this page are talking about US numbers. I have gone through and clarified that we are only talking about a recent phenomon in the US in this article, but I wonder if this article is needed/warranted as all this info is covered in more detail and context in the Colony collapse disorder page. A redirect to that page would be better IMHO. Tobus (talk) 03:36, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

No source for the basic claim of the article
"Over the past decade, there has been a radical and unprecedented population decline of Western honey bees in the United States."

If you look at the article quoted in the "effects of the decline" section, this basic claim of the article simply isn't true. The paper (here: ) shows that the rate of decline has been besically linear since 1945 - and if anything, it has slowed down or even *reversed* since around 2005.

Unless there are some better sources, this article should be completely rewritten. 195.37.166.248 (talk) 10:03, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree - the contents of this article are a poorer version of Colony Collapse Disorder. I made a topic a few weeks back suggesting a merge with that page and haven't got any responses, I'll give a another week or so for people to comment and then perform the merge if no one objects. Tobus (talk) 10:11, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Merge Proposal
This page isn't factually accurate (US bee numbers have slightly increased over the past decade) and the issue is discussed in more detail on the Colony collapse disorder page... we should just merge it rather than repeating the info, in a less accurate way, here. Tobus (talk) 10:18, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I've gone ahead and made this article a redirect to Colony collapse disorder Tobus (talk) 09:21, 17 April 2017 (UTC)