Paul Stamets on science: what the evidence says · JRE #1385

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Stamets attributes an 84% beehive die-off to Oklahoma roughly two years before this 2019 conversation, implying a catastrophic single-state collapse around 2017. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), which conducts the official quarterly survey of commercial honey bee colonies, reported Oklahoma colony loss rates of 24%, 2%, 15%, and 6% across the four quarters of 2016, and 24% and 2% for the first two quarters of 2017, in its August 2017 Honey Bee Colonies report, the period corresponding to "two years" before this taping. No quarter or annual figure for Oklahoma in NASS's published data approaches 84%; nationally, quarterly losses in that same period ranged from roughly 8% to 17%. No corroborating USDA, university, or beekeeping-industry report describing an 84% Oklahoma-specific colony loss for any year in this timeframe was found. The figure as stated does not match available government data and appears to be either a misremembered statistic or a conflation with a much smaller subset (such as one operation's losses or losses from Colony Collapse Disorder specifically) rather than a true statewide loss rate.