If one considers my oft-mentioned observation even slightly valid, that the combination of fast ships, multi-mode containers for freight, and the resulting massively-increased volume of uninspected international trade is a source of a wide range of invasives, then it is not the bees that are in danger, it is us. The bees will likely survive long after we've killed ourselves off. By making an environment where bees can survive, we merely work to assure own our survival.
But while Apis as a whole may not be endangered at all, for the specific hives we care for (and care about), the news has been getting more gloomy for quite some time:
Let's compare Pre World-Trade Catastrophe survival with Post World-Trade Catastrophe survival statistics for feral colonies, those beyond beekeeper influence, free of the rough-and-tumble of agriculture, deprived of miticides and medicines:
PRE WORLD TRADE
============
Feral Queen Survival (1978, Seeley)
Yr 1: 79%
Yr 2: 26%
Yr 3: 0%
Swarm Survival of 1st Winter < 33% (1978, Seeley)
Feral Colony Survival 3.5 yrs (Kraus and Page, 1995)
POST WORLD TRADE
=============
Feral Queen Survival
(1995, Gordon) 10 months 61%
(1998 Guzman) 12 months 28%
More recently, we've had Jeff Pettis saying in presentations that queens have not even been surviving long enough to complete 4-month studies, including both control and test colonies.
Feral Colony Survival
(Kraus and Page, 1995) < 1 year
So things have gotten tangibly and significantly worse for hives in North America, and merely keeping bees alive has become much more difficult in the time since I started keeping bees. It has become a dice roll even under ideal conditions of husbandry and monitoring. The only successful stewardship model we have to follow is the "Ducks Unlimited" model, where the duck hunters themselves became the fiercest and most vocal environmentalists, saving the rivers, ponds, streams, wetlands, and ducks, all so that they would not run out of... plentiful short range, slow-moving targets. If guys with guns who shoot defenseless harmless birds for mere sport can succeed, beekeepers certainly can.
As the stewards of bees we are honor-bound to do our best to care for creatures who are struggling to live long enough to get a chance to merely reproduce (swarm) even once solely due to man's greed and disdain for bio-security. We've seen what a chance at notoriety and funding or a big settlement check has done to some of us, we have been treated to the sad and pathetic spectacle of "celebrity-wannabe beekeepers", yet the only new idea in varroa control in more than a decade is nothing but an entrance tunnel lined with Check-Mite, a hope to kill varroa entering the hive on the backs of bees.
Other parasites riding on the backs of bees include a large number of groups who have every incentive to continue to misdirect the public, as this assures them of an ongoing source of donations. Even though offering mutually exclusive accusations, they still band together on occasion, neither faction admitting that banning GMOs would require more pesticide use and visa-versa.
We beekeepers need to make very clear that what we do is not for money or recognition, but because we feel the obligation do what little one can to stop the careless destruction that is left behind by those who pay no attention to a bloom on a tree, an insect harvesting pollen from the bloom, and the stillness of that event.
The bees are merely one set of many victims. The actual crime is the deliberate and willful disdain for stillness itself, and the simple but profound events that require stillness. The cheaply-made consumer goods that arrive in containerized shipments that can also include insects carrying diseases are so popular because they are noisy and bright distractions, destroyers of stillness and contemplation - "media" devices. Phones, bluetooth speakers, 4K resolution TVs, all the toys that everyone pays so much to "get away from" on a beach, a mountain, or a cruise ship. Both the consumer goods and the package vacations are nothing but ways to distract people from how empty their lives are without the stillness they have helped to destroy.
Especially in a larger city, it is incredibly difficult to teach something like this, but it is so critical to show that a simple beehive can create this sort of stillness in the middle of the hurry, deafening noise, and the thick fog of greed and self-aggrandizement that surrounds us. Overlooking all the concrete, glass, steel, and technology, my window-sill garden and a glass container with some Paperwhites in bloom give me as much joy as I got from an entire farm. The scarcity of green and quiet in a metropolis prompts 50 people to happily share a postage-stamp sized "community garden", even when it only gets a few hours' sun a day due to the overshadowing chrome and glass monoliths to capitalism that surround it.
The message we might "sell" is that bees, as the hood ornament on the environment as a whole, deserve better than a few million a year in federal R&D funding, and deserve attention to more than the propaganda wars between the NRDC and Bayer CropScience. Politics, petitions, and bans will not save the bees, only more R&D will.
To start, no more bee beards. No more clowning around, no more obediently posing with a frame of bees for a photo to go next to whatever drivel was fed the reporter by a random press release. Write up a good rant, and carry it around in your wallet, and if accosted by the media, pull it out, grab the reporter by the lapels, and tell him the truth. Then set him back down on the ground and let him go.
And yes this IS the forum. If not here, then where? If not now, then when?
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