The United States just quietly had the worst honey bee die-off in our nation’s history, and multiple pesticides were present in almost every hive researchers tested. New Jersey’s unique variations of farmland, suburbs, and lawn chemicals make the state one of the most complicated places in the country to be a honey bee.
Going back to summer 2024 until about early 2025, the country’s commercial beekeepers lost roughly 62 percent of their hives. For any math fans, that’s upwards of 1.7 million colonies, the largest die-off ever recorded in United States history.
Longer surveys reported that annual hive losses above 50 percent have become something of the norm.
Scientists have always fingered what they call the “Four Ps” as the cause. That’s “pesticides, pathogens, parasites, and poor nutrition.” The most difficult of which to prove has been, you guessed it, pesticides. Up until recently, data and testing have come back clean.
But that doesn’t mean the pesticides weren’t there.
For years, state and federal pesticide screenings kept returning the same result on collapsed hives. Negative. Non-detectable. Below threshold. Beekeepers were watching their colonies die and getting told the chemicals weren’t the problem.
Dr. Scott McArt, Associate Professor of Pollinator Health at Cornell University, had a different theory. The tests weren’t finding pesticides because the tests weren’t sensitive enough to find them. Standard regulatory equipment was built with detection thresholds too high to catch low-dose, chronic exposure. The kind that doesn’t drop a bee immediately but breaks it down over time. Those missed exposures were being filed as clean results.
McArt’s lab rebuilt the test from scratch. The new screening panel detects over 100 distinct pesticides at sub-nanogram per gram levels. Less than one part per billion. Then they actually used it.
What Researchers Found
The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service took McArt’s methods and applied them across what researchers call a multi-tier matrix. Incoming pollen, bee bread, beeswax, nectar, adult bee tissue. The works.
Pesticide residues showed up in nearly every hive tested. Some survey sets came back at 98 percent or higher. Not one chemical either. Individual pollen and wax samples contained complex mixtures of neonicotinoids, fungicides, herbicides, and in-hive miticides like Amitraz all at once. Bees were also dragging back pesticides from farms miles away, residues picked up through wind, water, and off-site foraging with no connection to where the hives were actually sitting.
Why New Jersey Can’t Catch a Break
Every spring, tens of thousands of commercial honey bee colonies get trucked into New Jersey. Most of them end up in the Pine Barrens and South Jersey, pollinating blueberries and cranberries, two of the state’s most economically significant crops. It’s one of the most important pollination corridors on the entire East Coast.
McArt’s research showed the biggest pesticide risk during bloom isn’t even the crop being pollinated. It’s everything else. Bees forage off-site constantly, picking up residues from neighboring fields, orchards, and managed landscapes on their way back to the hive.
New Jersey makes that problem considerably worse. It’s the most densely populated state in the country, and the geography reflects it. Commercial farmland in Burlington County shares a fence line with suburban backyards. Golf courses. Residential properties getting treated with lawn fungicide, tick spray, and turf chemicals every other week. A hive parked on an organic blueberry farm in Hammonton is still foraging into the subdivision next door.
For years, NJ beekeepers sent samples from collapsed hives to standard testing labs and got the same answer back. Below threshold. The Cornell and USDA panel explains what was actually happening in those hives the whole time.
The Cocktail Nobody Was Measuring
The research reframed the entire question. It was never really about whether a single pesticide exceeded a lethal dose. It’s about what happens when dozens of them show up together.
Fungicides are a good example. Regulators have largely categorized them as bee-safe for years. What McArt’s findings showed is that fungicides can block the metabolic enzymes bees use to detoxify insecticides. Mixed together, the toxicity doesn’t just add up. It multiplies. Exponentially.
On top of that, these chemical mixtures interact with Varroa destructor mites and the viruses they carry, including Deformed Wing Virus. The bee’s immune system gets hit from two directions at once. Chronic exposure to complex chemical cocktails isn’t an edge case for American honey bees at this point. It’s their everyday reality.
New Jersey Moved First. It Wasn’t Enough.
In 2022, New Jersey passed the Neonicotinoid Limitation Act, known as S1016, banning non-agricultural outdoor uses of neonicotinoid pesticides. It was one of the more aggressive pollinator protection laws in the country at the time, and McArt’s research is the scientific argument for exactly why it made sense. Lawn and turf chemicals were ending up in bee bread and wax right alongside agricultural chemicals, and the state recognized it before most.
The problem is that the law addressed one class of chemicals. The cocktail has dozens.
New Jersey’s blueberry harvest, its cranberry bogs, its entire spring pollination economy depends on those migratory colonies showing up healthy every year. The science finally caught up to what beekeepers here have been saying for a decade. The testing exists now. The legislation passed. And we just recorded the worst die-off in American history anyway.
With many substandard commercialized honey brands in grocery stores and an uncertain year ahead for honey bees, there’s no telling what the future holds.
Michael is the Editor-in-Chief of New Jersey Digest and Creative Director at X Factor Media. A Bergen County native, he discovered his passion for storytelling while studying at Montclair State University. In addition to his work in journalism and media, Michael is an avid fiction writer. Outside the office, he enjoys kayaking, a bold glass of Nebbiolo, and the fine art of over-editing.