After five years of annual colony losses near or above 30 percent, beekeepers have settled in for the long haul in their struggle to find solutions to the problem of unsustainably high honeybee death losses. Scientists have also settled in to help them. A new consortium called the Bee Informed Partnership, under the leadership of project director Dennis vanEngelsdorp, was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture last May with $5 million for five years. Instead of the lofty research goal of finding “the cause” of the mysterious colony collapse disorder, this is an extension endeavor to help beekeepers identify […]