npr:

It’s a sweltering morning in Beltsville, Md., and I’m face-to-face with bee doom. Mark Dykes, a “Bee Squad coordinator” at the University of Maryland, shakes a Mason jar filled with buzzing honeybees that are coated with powdered sugar. The sugar loosens the grip of tiny Varroa mites, a parasite that plagues bees; as he sifts the powder into a bowl, they poke out like hairy pebbles in snow.

“Right now there [are] three mites per hundred [bees],” says Dennis vanEngelsdorp, associate professor of entomology at the University of Maryland and president of the Bee Informed Partnership, which studies bee survival rates. That’s a high rate of mites, vanEngelsdorp says: “If this were September and you were seeing that number, you’d expect the hive to die” during the lean months of winter.

Bee colony death continues to rise. According to the Bee Informed Partnership’s latest survey, released this week, U.S. beekeepers lost nearly 40% of their honeybee colonies last winter — the greatest reported winter hive loss since the partnership started its surveys 13 years ago. The total annual loss was slightly above average.

More Bad Buzz For Bees: Record Number Of Honeybee Colonies Died Last Winter

Photos: Olivia Falcigno/NPR