What's behind the historic honeybee hive die-off?
Good Food
KCRW
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You better bee-lieve it, we're talking about honeybee headaches.
- Former beekeeper Adam Novicki explains the causes of this year's historic honeybee die-off
- Sawdust covered floors, free peanuts, and stiff martinis are hallmarks of Chez Jay, which celebrates 66 years along Route 66
- Jenny Linford explores cooking, eating, and drinking through objects in the British Museum's collection
- Chef Katie Reicher of legendary San Francisco restaurant Greens shares vegetarian recipes from her repertoire
- Baker Nicole Rucker adopts a fruit tree and sets her sights on a glazed peach pie
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and this is Good Food. |
| 0:10.6 | You've probably heard about colony collapse disorder and the many problems facing our bee population. |
| 0:18.7 | These issues have persisted for nearly a decade, but this winter was |
| 0:23.2 | particularly disastrous for U.S. beekeepers. Between June 24 and January 2025, |
| 0:32.0 | 62% of commercial honeybee colonies in the United States died. |
| 0:38.1 | That's the largest die-off on record, |
| 0:41.3 | and it comes on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter. |
| 0:47.3 | What is going on? |
| 0:48.8 | We decided to ask Adam Novicki, |
| 0:52.0 | an agricultural supervisor at the University of California's Agriculture and Natural Resources Department. |
| 0:58.9 | He was also, for a few years, a hobbyist beekeeper. |
| 1:02.7 | Hi, Adam. |
| 1:04.1 | Hi. How are you? |
| 1:05.9 | I'm good. Thank you so much for coming back to good food. |
| 1:10.3 | So let's talk about this past winter and what happened. |
| 1:14.8 | Why did so many hives have so much die-off? There appears to be a number one culprit, right? |
| 1:22.5 | I wish it was a single smoking gut, but it's not. The Varroa destructor is the scientific name of the |
| 1:30.6 | varroa mite. And that mite is not from the U.S. It came to America, the United States, |
| 1:38.0 | in the early 90s. And it originally was from eastern Russia, and it coexisted with another bee called Apis Serrana, |
| 1:49.5 | which is there's many different bee species, and Apis Malifera is the one that we know in the West. |
| 1:56.0 | Long story short is the Apis Serrana had evolved with that that might and one of the things is being |
| 2:04.0 | very vigilant about keeping them off of other bees it's called a grooming you know or hygienic |
... |
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