What this site does not claim about bees, and why

The rule we are following

Every ActSmall topic operates on a single editorial rule: where the named scientific or public-health authorities converge, we display it; where they diverge or are silent, we do not invent a position. The pollinator literature is unusually prone to slogan-vs-evidence drift, so this primer is longer than most. It says what we deliberately do not put on the map, and which body's published position is the reason.

“Honey-bees are dying out”

Globally, the number of managed honey-bee (Apis mellifera) colonies has grown by roughly 50% since 1961 according to FAO/FAOSTAT bee-stock data^[1]. There are real and serious annual overwinter losses in many regions (the US, Europe), and these are well-documented by the Bee Informed Partnership, COLOSS, and the EU's EPILOBEE survey. But the global stock trend is up, not down. We display country-level FAOSTAT honey-bee stock data; we do not display it under a “honey-bees are dying out” framing, because the FAO data does not support that framing^[2].

Colony Collapse Disorder as the current crisis

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a specific syndrome, recorded primarily between 2006 and roughly 2009 in the US, in which adult worker bees disappeared from colonies leaving capped brood and stored food. The US Department of Agriculture and the EPA both publish that no single causal agent was confirmed, and that CCD as originally defined is no longer the dominant reported loss pattern in the US^[3]. We do not present CCD as the live story. The live story is annual overwinter loss with multifactorial causes (varroa mite, pesticide exposure, forage loss, viral load), which is a different and more boring picture.

Neonicotinoids as a single global public-health story

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has concluded that three neonicotinoid insecticides — clothianidin, imidacloprid, thiamethoxam — pose high acute risks to honey-bees in most agricultural uses, and the EU has restricted outdoor use of all three since 2018^[4]. We cite EFSA's conclusion and the EU restriction. We do not extend it into a global claim that all neonicotinoid use everywhere is contraindicated; that is a national agriculture-policy decision the relevant national regulators make case-by-case, and EPA, PMRA (Canada), and APVMA (Australia) have each landed at different positions. We display what each named regulator has said; we do not invent a consensus.

Specific honey health claims

Honey has narrow clinical uses in wound-care settings, principally with sterilised manuka honey products supplied through licensed wound-care channels (cited by the Cochrane Wounds Group)^[5]. Beyond clinical wound care under qualified supervision, we do not endorse claims that consumer table honey treats allergies, cures infections, or replaces medication. None of those broader claims are endorsed by the WHO, the European Medicines Agency, or the US FDA, and we hold to the project's accuracy-or-silence rule.

EMF / 5G effects on bee navigation

A handful of primary studies have hypothesised effects of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields on honey-bee orientation. There is no consensus position from the WHO, ICNIRP, IUCN, or any national bee-research institute that consumer wireless infrastructure is a population-level driver of bee decline. We do not show an EMF layer for the same reason the ground topic does not show one: ICNIRP and the WHO have not classified it as a public-health story at consumer exposures, and the IARC's Group 2B classification of RF EMF (2011) is explicit about its narrow scope.

“Stop spraying your lawn = save the bees”

Reducing household pesticide use is reasonable and we cite it as a contributing action. We do not present it as the single highest-leverage citizen action, because the entomological societies (Entomological Society of America, Royal Entomological Society) and the IUCN Bumblebee Specialist Group all converge on the same finding: habitat loss and forage simplification are the dominant drivers of wild-bee decline in most documented cases^[6]. Planting native forage is therefore the project's recommended single-action, not lawn-spray reduction. Both are good; one is higher-leverage than the other.

Africanized honey-bees as a public-health emergency

Africanized honey-bee (AHB) range expansion is real, well-documented across the southern US and Latin America, and a defensive-behaviour public-safety topic in some specific regions. The CDC and state-level public-health departments publish region-specific guidance. We do not present AHBs as a global public-health story, because the named authorities do not.

Where this leaves us

The bees topic on this site is built around three things the named bodies do agree on: wild bees are not honey-bees and the trend lines disagree; habitat and forage loss are the dominant drivers of wild-bee decline; and planting native, regionally-appropriate flowering plants in soil you control is the single most-tractable household action. Everything else is framing, and where the framing outruns the published evidence, we leave it off the map.