I actually tried looking up stuff to make sure that my typical pessimism was warranted and ended up finding a 2022 paper in Scientific Reports (so Nature Publishing affiliated but not Nature Nature) that does a quick review of managed bee colonies since the 1960’s <link>. Long story short, there are now more bee colonies globally than there were 60 years ago. But, there are fewer colonies  and less beeswax per capita than before (though more honey per capita). Honestly, this makes me a bit more optimistic because at least it seems like we’re not about to run out of bees. At least not until the consequences of (mostly) untackled climate change continue to bite us (not an opinion of the report, just a personal one with no substantiation. Actually, it mentions that a warming climate in some regions has increased the forageable hours of bees there. Y’know just like how the warming climate is also helping the spread of mosquitos. Seems great for some bugs, frankly).

The report doesn’t talk at all about unmanaged colonies, and I was too lazy to try searching for that, so who knows what that situation is like. Also the metrics shown for the U.S. in Fig. 6 might explain why I don’t see that many bees around. Or it’s just my own confirmation bias. Oh well. As long as there are some damn pollinators around life’ll go on.

Paper:

Phiri, B.J., Fèvre, D. & Hidano, A. Uptrend in global managed honey bee colonies and production based on a six-decade viewpoint, 1961–2017. Sci Rep 12, 21298 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25290-3