Perspective- Say a colony of 50k bees loses 30k over winter. Over 20 years
that is 600k bees.

If you have 5,000 colonies, you lose 3 billion bees over 20 years so we are
looking at 500k colonies in all of the EU and US.

But the latest estimate of number of colonies is 3,000k for the US alone.
Hence we lost 30 times more bees in the US by normal attrition, much less
cell phones, GMO and all the rest over the past 20 years.

If you really wanted to make the numbers blossom, just add normal yearly
attrition because of the bees short lifespan.

Truth is, if you take the number of colonies 20 years ago compared to now,
then the 300B number is understated. But that number has been going down for
a variety of reasons (mostly economic), well before Varroa and the rest.

As Peter noted, the numbers are meaningless.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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