Something disturbing is happening to honey bee colonies and scientists can't explain why

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Honey bees are nearly as essential to our food system as crops themselves.

Depending on how the research is conducted, pollinators are needed to produce approximately one-third of the food we eat (more, according to some estimates). Bees also contribute about $17 billion to the US agricultural industry each year. And it'd be extremely hard and expensive to get your hands on coffee without them, making them a key part of the global economy.

So it's unfortunate to note that, according to newly released survey data, honey bees are in serious trouble.

Bees have struggled in general for years, facing problems that wreak havoc on populations like colony collapse disorder.

But a new report from the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP), a group of leading researchers funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, is particularly disturbing.

Below is what the researchers have found since they first started tracking bee colony losses in 2007.

The total losses of colonies (yellow) are trending upward year-over-year:

AP

"When we started the survey, we focused on winter losses as winter is generally seen as the most stressful time of the year for bees," Nathalie Steinhauer, the survey coordinator and a Ph.D. candidate in entomology at the University of Maryland, tells Tech Insider in an email.

But they started tracking things more closely to assess the effects of different beekeeping practices and became aware of some disturbing information as a result.

"High levels of summer losses came as a surprise for us," Steinhauer writes.

These trends are a big deal for several reasons.

For one, summer losses are now as bad as winter losses, but summer is when bees are supposed to thrive, flying from flower to flower with abundant food and beautiful weather.

But the data also show that, despite recent efforts to cut back on the use of certain pesticides — and a White House-inspired push to cut winter colony losses to 15% over the next ten years — overall losses seem to be just as bad as they've been, if not worse (the 2015-2016 data set is not yet complete).

In the Washington Post, Chelsea Harvey writes that there's more and more of an understanding that bee colony losses are being driven by multiple factors, especially pesticide use, disease, and environmental problems.

That losses are so high in the summer indicates that whatever is killing bees is causing serious trouble even when there should be fewer problems for the pollinators.

It's still a little too soon to tease out a full trend for what's happening to bee populations from this data, according to Steinhauer.

But according to the USDA, these annual colony losses need to be knocked down to about 18.7% if they are to be manageable.

If not, we may need to say goodbye to a whole lot of delicious food and a sizable chunk of the world economy.

Dave Mosher contributed to this post.

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