One Michigan television station recently led with the headline: “Numbers of managed honey bee colonies plummeting.” It explained: “According to the USDA the total number of managed honey bee colonies has decreased by 2.5 million since the 1940s.”<1> This is misleading for a number of reasons.

First of all, there’s no plummeting of bee numbers. A full-strength hive can easily hold 30,000 or 40,000, which means there are around 80 billion honeybees in the United States—ten for every human on the planet. The United Nations counts about 80 million hives worldwide, meaning the global total of honeybees is a 13-digit number of a magnitude more commonly used to measure government debt.

And secondly, honeybees are just one of over 20,000 known bee species, so it’s safe to conclude that the managed honeybee shortage just isn’t a real thing, especially since it has become an amateur fad and that has led to many deaths from mismanagement.

Activists want everyone to think otherwise for a simple reason: Dead bees are great for fundraising. Depending on the time of year, a worker bee might only live five or six weeks before keeling over. Even so, sometimes activists can’t find any bee corpses to mourn over and have been forced to resort to dressing up in bee costumes to stage a “die in.”<2> The impression that they mean to convey is that big, bad pesticides are wiping bees out to the edge of extinction. The activists single out neonicotinoids, the most popular, most modern and most effective insecticide as the cause of the supposed decline.

It’s a nice story, but it doesn’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny. Neonicotinoids, or neonics for short, came on the market in the mid-1990s, back when U.S. honeybee colony numbers hovered in the 2.6 million range. There are more colonies today, even with the latest dip, than there were in 1995.  In other words, bees aren’t dying off in the wake of modern pesticides, they’re growing.