Good morning, Elaine -
 
I'm not sure how many answers you will get from a shotgun question like that but I am reasonably certain that the answers will be as much motivated by the answerer's politics as by the underlying facts.
 
Having said that, let me answer some of your questions as best I can.  I am going to put them in order based on my own opinion of the reliability of the answers.

1.  How have honey yields changed over the years?   Several organizations try to track honey harvests at least in the US.  The most comprehensive and reasonably reliable ones that I know of are maintained by BeeCulture and have been published annually for some years now.  Having said that, there is a significant competitive advantage to disguising or even lying about your numbers.  And several of the collection methodologies are susceptible to skewing when a large-scale producer puts honey into inventory for a year.
2.  What's the data on colony losses over the past two decades?  Nobody knows and anybody saying differently is trying to sell you something.  Several researchers have some decent guesses but there are no reporting standards, no standardized methods of collecting data, not even definitions of what it means to have a "colony loss".  Several projects were started in the late 2000s to try to gather such data going forward but no one has good data going backwards.  And the forward-looking projects remain skewed by geography and beekeeper demographics.
3.  How much research is being conducted?  Research into what?  Bee behavior?  Bee losses?  Bees generally?  Do you measure volume of research by grant dollars, labor hours or papers published?  Flottum and the other magazine editors keep tabs on a lot of bee-related research but I am not aware of anything trustworthy on "how much" research is conducted.
4.  Are public education initiatives successful?  It depends on your definition of success.  More than that, however, I'm not sure that anyone has ever really tried.  What do you think the public needs education on?  Honey is good for you?  Eat more honey?  Bees are in danger?  Overuse of pesticides is bad?
5.  How powerful are the chemical (pesticide) lobbies, in comparison to the government?  The question poses a false dichotomy.  Pesticide lobbies are exactly as powerful as their respective governments allow them to be.  More than that, they are generally aligned in their goals.  The people who work at pesticide companies and the farmers and consumers who benefit from their use are constituents of the government just like the rest of us.  They have the same right to participate in government and the same obligation to educate and inform on their point of view as the anti-pesticide advocates.  (Both sides, by the way, consider themselves "environmentalists".  The pesticide researchers believe that because they are obsoleting more toxic and persistent chemicals and because they are making the existing farmland more productive, allowing other land to be set aside for preserves.  The anti-pesticide people believe that because they hold a different
 definition of environmentalism.)  My own cynical opinion is that the government then ignores all of us equally.
6.  How quickly is bee-friendly legislation passed?  Again, this depends on what you mean by "bee-friendly".  Is it bee-friendly to formally allow beekeeping in a municipality?  Is it bee-friendly to load that permission with such high registration fees that you drive out all but the most avid hobbyist?  Is it bee-friendly to oppose new pesticides because they might harm the bees or bee-friendly to support them if they might result in less harm to habitat?  Is it bee-friendly to oppose sugar subsidies because it will reopen the market to competition (and presumably raise honey prices) or is it bee-friendly to support them because it keeps the cost of emergency feed down?  Beekeepers are no more unified than any other section of the population and hold widely different opinions about what is "bee-friendly".  The only uncontroversially-bee-friendly proposal that I can think of is habitat preservation - and I don't see that happening anywhere.

Mike Rossander

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