In a Bloomington backyard, beekeeper Joe May carries a smoke tin as he walks through swarms of bees buzzing around stacks of hive boxes. After two decades of beekeeping, he doesn’t worry about getting stung.
May, owner of Little Bits Honey Bees, manages roughly 144 hives at his home yard and about 500 colonies as part of an operation selling queen bees and nucleus colonies, also called “nucs.”
In 2025, May lost 13 percent of his colonies during a nationwide honey bee die off.
He was lucky.
Between 2024 and 2025, an outbreak of Varroa mites wiped out more than 60 percent of commercial colonies across the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.
“They attach themself to the bee and they suck, not blood, they suck the lymphatic fluids out of the bee,” May said, “These mites are fairly small, they're about the size of a pinhead, but compared to us, it'd be like a rat hanging on the side of us.”
May said bee populations have stabilized since last year.
“You can lose 50 percent of your bees, and in six months, if you're good, you can be back to where you were at in six months,” May said. “Now, if we lost 60 percent of our cattle, we'd be lucky to recover in four years.”
May said mite management has changed since he started bee keeping. It now requires more frequent treatment rotations than in past decades.
“If you don’t treat four times a year, you’re gonna lose your bees,” he said. “The old guys, they just ain't changed their ways — you need to kind of change it up — and they got burnt pretty hard.”
Colony losses varied across the bee keeping industry. Hobbyist beekeepers lost an average of about 51 percent and “sideliner” operations run as a business in addition to a job lost about 54 percent, according to the Honey Bee Health Coalition.
The USDA estimated roughly 1.7 million hives collapsed in 2025. Financial impacts reached more than $600 million.
May said agriculture also felt the effects of reduced pollination capacity last year.
“The honey bee is one of the biggest pollinators in the United States,” he said. “It’s up there around 65% of everything that’s pollinated. If we lose the bees, our dietary intake would be quite a bit different. We’d lose about 70% of our fruits and vegetables.”
Almond pollination in California requires the annual transport of millions of bee colonies from across the U.S. May said almond season could have been a factor in the die off.
“They take out something like 3 million colonies out there every year to pollinate almonds,” May said. “The big guys used to, what would take five years to circle around the US, now takes six months.”
May described a yearlong cycle followed by many commercial beekeepers. Colonies are staged in Texas and Mississippi in December, then moved to California in late January for almond pollination. There, colonies expand and are later split into nucs, which are sold to beekeepers nationwide, a practice May said can spread pests and diseases.
“They bring them back here, they break them up, sell nucs off of them,” May said. “Whatever's in the almond bees comes back every year.”
Following the 2025 losses, Little Bits has seen consistent demand for nucs and queens as colonies are rebuilding. May said recovery inside the colony typically involves rebuilding brood cycles and introducing new queens.
“I'll take a frame of brood and give them a queen and they will start over,” May said. “It's a little slow, but in six months you can recover if everything's done right.”
He said he has sold between 600 and 1,000 queens and around 100 nucs this year.
“People lost their bees,” May said. “I’ve sold a lot of bees.”
May said the losses show how much modern beekeeping has changed from what was a hands-off hobby. Managing colonies now requires constant monitoring, regular mite treatments and compliance with regulations that did not exist when he started.
He said the U.S. approval process for new treatments is slow compared to other countries. For example, small hive beetle pesticides that have been used in places like Australia for years are not widely available in the U.S.
He also said antibiotics like terramycin that were once used to treat diseases such as European foulbrood have been restricted by USDA changes and now require a prescription from a veterinarian.
“Before 1984, you could come out here, a family could set a hive up, and they pull the honey off of it once a year, and they didn't have to do nothing to the hive, it was fine,” May said. “Nowadays you just gotta do a lot more, you gotta treat a lot and hope for the best.”
