Deborah:
"why take all these surveys on survival rates when I believe most hobbyists aren’t involved with surveys?"
Actually, the reverse is true. The majority of the responses that BIP gets back are from hobby/backyard beekeepers. They are the beekeepers whose data is pitched to the media about alarmist levels of bee loss. ''... the nation's beekeepers lost 44% of their colonies.....2016"
No, the nation's small scale, often beginning or still struggling to keep bees alive for more than one year, lost 44%. And the 44% is the % of beekeepers who lost colonies, not the percent of colonies lost.
The "nation's" commercial beekeepers lost about 24-25% year after year by their own data. That's in line with Tom Seeley's feral colonies.
The largest numbers of colonies on which the 'estimates' are made are clearly commercial, the largest number of responders have a fraction of the number of colonies on which the 'guesstimates' were made.
On this list, we have beat to death the issue of how to estimate annual loss - with no clear consensus. Yet, I think the commercial folks are probably doing a bit better job at estimating their losses - they know whether they are up or down each year based on long-term experience. There's a filtering system in place - do a poor job and you're out-of-business.
The biggest problem with BIP is the 'swags' from the hobby and small scale and BIP's lack of gathering any data on experience, training, whether the backyard folks are Treatment Free, all Natural, etc. There's no way to properly stratify the data.
Commercial - fair to say, they're mostly migratory, which should result, if one believes in the 'feedlot' myth, in higher losses, due to stress, but if there's any degree of confidence in the reports, it's being managed by the commercial folks surprisingly well.
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