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Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees?

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Where in the unholy heck did all these bees come from?!

After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high.

We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over.

This prompted so many questions. Does this mean the insect apocalypse is over? Are pollinators saved? Did we unravel the web of maladies known as colony collapse disorder?

But let’s start with the most important question: Is there, in fact, a bee boom?

We consider the census from the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) to be the gold standard, but another data set from those quantitative crusaders, the annual honey report, actually shows bee colonies losing ground.

Agriculture Department economist Stan Daberkow, who helped write the definitive comparison of these sources, retired in 2008 but continues to follow the beekeeping business closely. When we tracked him down, he dove headfirst into our data mystery, sending us theories and exchanging emails at 1:35 a.m. and beyond.

Like any source produced by humans and constrained by budgets, Daberkow said, the honey report and Census of Agriculture have their limitations. The honey report focuses on operations with five or more hives, while the census includes every farm in the country. In this case, “farm” means any plot of land that sells at least $1,000 of agriculture products in a year, a measure that could include more hobbyists and dabblers in the buzz biz.

Inflation also increases the share of beekeepers who qualify for the census: The Agriculture Department’s $1,000 farm definition hasn’t changed since 1975. So as honey prices, pollination fees, hive prices and other sources of bee revenue rise, more hobbyists will magically transmogrify into “farmers.” Some of those new farmers, plus others discovered through census outreach efforts, might get added to the honey report. So next year’s honey report could paint a sunnier picture.

Daberkow said he was somewhat “leery” of the latest census data. Given less-than-ideal recent honey prices, major producers shouldn’t have much incentive to expand their operations. “Any growth would likely have come in smaller operations, a demographic USDA goes to great lengths to track down for the census,” he said.

Sure enough, the census shows the number of operations with any bee colonies has ascended far faster than honey production or bee-colony counts — about 160 percent since 2007.

Much of the explosion of small producers came in just one state: Texas. The Lone Star State has gone from having the sixth-most bee operations in the country to being so far ahead of anyone else that it out-bees the bottom 21 states combined.

Our data showed the biggest increases in north Texas, a region not traditionally considered a honey hotbed. So we started dialing beekeepers to ask what was going on. The first thing we learned? Our job would be half as hard and twice as joyful if all our sources were Texas bee boosters. Every last one seemed genuinely thrilled to pick up the phone.

Consider John Talbert of Sabine Creek Honey Farm, age 85. A past president of both the Association for Facilities Engineering and the Texas Beekeepers Association, Talbert takes a spoonful of honey before bed each night and brings a jar of wildflower honey to every politician he meets. He does the same for his doctor and his dentist.

“That’s so small that it couldn’t be considered a bribe,” Talbert told us. “It’s just a gesture of good faith!”

Talbert is such an infectious evangelist, we suspect that he and his many protégés could have propelled the great American bee resurgence by enthusiasm alone. But the Texas beekeepers all pointed to one clear reason for the bee boom — and that reason answered the phone on our second try.

Dennis Herbert wouldn’t strike you as a political mover and shaker. A retired wildlife biologist, Herbert, 75, boasts of no fancy connections and drops no names. But in 2011, after keeping bees for a few years, he went to the Texas legislature and laid out a simple hypothetical.

“You own 200 acres on the other side of the fence from me, and you raise cotton for a living. You get your ag valuation and cheaper taxes on your property. I have 10 acres on the other side of the fence and raise bees, and I don’t receive my ag valuation. And yet my bees are flying across the fence and pollinating your crops and making a living for you,” Herbert said. “Well, I just never thought that quite fair.”

In 2012, the Herbert Hypothetical gave rise to a new law: Your plot of five to 20 acres now qualifies for agriculture tax breaks if you keep bees on it for five years.

Over the next few years, all 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example, six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break. Herbert keeps a spreadsheet of the regulations and drives across the state to educate bee-curious landowners.

Herbert himself doesn’t qualify for the exemption. His modest homestead in the tiny town of Salado, about an hour north of Austin, isn’t big enough. But, he says, “more bees provide more pollination, and so I get to eat a little better. I get my watermelon during the summer. And that doesn’t make me anybody special at all. I just, I like my watermelon.”

While Herbert never intended it, Texas bee exemptions have become big business. That has created an opportunity for Gary Barber, a former newspaper photographer.

Barber got bit by the bee bug after he left the Dallas Morning News in 2014. His firm, Honey Bees Unlimited, now leases and runs 1,500 hives for 170 clients in eight counties north of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. As developers split the once-rural countryside into five- and 10-acre ranchettes, he’s signing up new clients faster than he can split hives to place on their land.

“It’s crazy, the blanket of bees over these counties!” Barber said. “Honestly, it’s not bee country: You’re not going to make it like a traditional beekeeper. But it’s really great because … now we’ve got pollinators all around!”

Barber has risen to become vice president of the Texas Beekeepers Association and promotes the industry alongside Herbert — especially every other year when the Texas legislature is in session.

“There’s usually some legislator that wants to mess with [the tax break], and we’ve got to go tell them why it’s great,” Barber told us. “And luckily, while our two political parties don’t agree on much, they all seem to want to save bees.”

These Texans helped explain the rise in beekeeping operations. And they built our trust in the Census of Agriculture as a purveyor of weird truth. But even with its army of small producers, Texas still ranks only sixth in the number of actual bee colonies. To find the true core of the bee boom, we had to make like the Village People and go west.

When the census was taken in December 2022, California had more than four times as many bees as any other state. We emailed pollination expert Brittney Goodrich at the University of California at Davis, who explained that pollinating the California almond crop “demands most of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year.”

Every February and March, something like 170 million almond trees unite in one of Earth’s great synchronized acts of sexual reproduction — made possible by the migration of the bees.

Pollination — not honey prices — has been the true rocket booster strapped to the back of the modern beekeeping industry. And almond pollination is responsible for $4 of every $5 spent on bee fertility assistance in the United States, according to NASS.

America’s almond acreage has more than doubled since 2007 as the world’s food firms race to stuff the nut into every conceivable granola mix, nut butter and milk substitute. So it seems reasonable to assume the honeybee population doubled along with it. After all, those almonds aren’t pollinating themselves.

(Editor’s note: Some of those almonds are, in fact, pollinating themselves. But self-pollinating trees remain a small minority.)

So the situation on the ground seems to confirm the census: We probably do have a record number of honeybees.

Sadly, however, this does not mean we’ve defeated colony collapse. One major citizen-science project found that beekeepers lost almost half of their colonies in the year ending in April 2023, the second-highest loss rate on record.

For now, we’re making up for it with aggressive management. The Texans told us that they were splitting their hives more often, replacing queens as often as every year and churning out bee colonies faster than the mites, fungi and diseases can take them down.

But this may not be good news for bees in general.

“It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators,” said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at Binghamton University, who noted that domesticated honeybees are a threat to North America’s 4,000 native bee species, about 40 percent of which are vulnerable to extinction.

Grames helps lead EntoGEM, a collaborative effort to sift through more than 120,000 often-obscure scholarly articles worldwide in search of hidden insect-population data. Grames said the consensus holds that pollinators, like all insects, are in decline — losing probably 1 to 2 percent a year.

(“Pollinators” is not a synonym for “bees,” by the way. Legions of insects have evolved to help native plants with long-distance reproduction, including butterflies, moths, beetles, flies, midges and gnats. Many aren’t even fully known to science, so we can’t say with certainty they’re declining. But optimism would seem misplaced.)

Many of the same forces collapsing managed beehives also decimate their native cousins, only the natives don’t usually have entire industries and governments pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting them. Grames compared the situation to birds, another sector in which maladies common in farmed animals, such as bird flu, threaten their wild cousins.

“You wouldn’t be like, ‘Hey, birds are doing great. We’ve got a huge biomass of chickens!’ It’s kind of the same thing with honeybees,” she said. “They’re domesticated. They’re essentially livestock.”

Mace Vaughan leads pollinator and agricultural biodiversity at Xerces, an insect-conservation outfit that has grown from five to nearly 80 employees during his 24 years there. Vaughan says it’s not a zero-sum game: For native pollinators to win, honeybees don’t have to lose. If we focus not on tax breaks, but on limiting the use of insecticide and promoting habitats such as meadows, hedgerows and wetlands, all pollinators can come out ahead.

“We’ve got really well-meaning people who are keeping honeybees because, ‘Oh, I’ve got to save the bees.’ That’s not the way you save the bees!” Vaughan told us. “The way you support both honeybees and beekeepers — and the way you save native pollinators — is to go out there and create beautiful flower-rich habitat on your farm or your garden.”

Howdy! The Department of Data seeks your quantitative queries. What are you curious about: Should we pay blood donors? When does spring really start? What’s the best time to get your flu shot? Just ask!

If your question inspires a column, we’ll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week we owe one to ace news researcher Razzan Nakhlawi, who helped us track down several bee-data experts.

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What student loan borrowers should know as Trump targets PSLF

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President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that aims to limit eligibility for a popular student loan forgiveness program.

According to Trump’s executive order, borrowers employed by organizations that do work involving “illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property and disruption of the public order” will “not be eligible for public service loan forgiveness.”

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2007, allows many not-for-profit and government employees to have their federal student loans canceled after 10 years of payments.

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The order says that PSLF “has misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest, but actually harm our national security and American values.”

Consumer advocates say that is not accurate, and were quick to condemn Trump’s move, accusing the president of depriving debt forgiveness to those who work in fields he does not approve of.

“The PSLF program, which was created by Congress almost 20 years ago, does not permit the administration to pick and choose which non-profits should qualify,” said Jessica Thompson, senior vice president of The Institute for College Access & Success.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request from CNBC for comment.

Here’s what borrowers in the program need to know.

Unclear which organizations could be excluded

For now, the language in the president’s order was fairly vague. As a result, it remains unclear exactly which organizations will no longer be considered a qualifying employer under PSLF, experts said.

The Trump administration might try “to exclude jobs that they deem objectionable,” said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.

What might that mean?

In his first few weeks in office, Trump’s executive orders have targeted immigrants, transgender and nonbinary people and those who work to increase diversity across the private and public sector. Many nonprofits work in these spaces, providing legal support or doing advocacy and education work.

“Borrowers that work for those organizations are concerned,” said Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit.

Changes could take ‘a year or more’

Borrowers in the PSLF program won’t see an immediate effect. Trump’s order requested an update to the regulations regarding the program, she said: “That process can take a year or more.”

“I also suspect that this will be challenged in court,” Mayotte said. “The bottom line is that 501(c)(3)s are eligible for PSLF under the law. An EO can’t change.”

Changes also can’t be retroactive, she said. That means that if you are currently working for or previously worked for an organization that the Trump administration later excludes from the program, you’ll still get credit for that time, at least up until the changes go into effect.

For now, those pursuing PSLF should print out a copy of their payment history on StudentAid.gov. Keep a record of the number of qualifying payments you’ve made so far.

With the PSLF help tool, borrowers can search for a list of qualifying employers and access the employer certification form. Try to fill out this form at least once a year, experts say.

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Do tariffs protect U.S. jobs and industry? Economists say no

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President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025.

Mandel Ngan-Pool/Getty Images

President Donald Trump has spoken of tariffs as a job-creating behemoth.

Tariffs will “create jobs like we have never seen before,” Trump said Tuesday during a joint session of Congress.

Economists disagree.

In fact, the tariff policies Trump has pursued since taking office would likely have the opposite effect, they said.

“It costs American jobs,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s.

He categorized tariffs imposed broadly as a “lose-lose.”

“There are no winners here in the trade war we’re seemingly being engulfed in,” Zandi said. 

A barrage of tariffs

The Trump administration has announced a barrage of tariffs since Inauguration Day.

Trump has imposed an additional duty of 20% on all imports from China. He put 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, the U.S.’ two biggest trade partners. (Just days after those took effect, the president delayed levies on some products for a month.)

Tariffs of 25% on steel and aluminum are set to take effect Wednesday, while duties on copper and lumber and reciprocal tariffs on all U.S. trade partners could be coming in the not-too-distant future.

There’s a deceptively simple logic to the protective power of such economic policy.

Tariffs generally aim to help U.S. companies compete more effectively with foreign competitors, by making it more expensive for companies to source products from overseas. U.S. products look more favorable, thereby lending support to domestic industry and jobs.

Workers pour molten steel at a machinery manufacturing company which produces for export in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province on March 5, 2025.

AFP via Getty Images

There’s some evidence of such benefits for targeted industries.

For example, steel tariffs during Trump’s first term reduced imports of steel from other nations by 24%, on average, over 2018 to 2021, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission. They also raised U.S. steel prices and domestic production by about 2% each, the report said.

New steel tariffs set to take effect March 12 would also “likely boost” steel prices, Shannon O’Neil and Julia Huesa, researchers at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in February.

Higher prices would likely benefit U.S. producers and add jobs to the steel industry’s current headcount, around 140,000, they said.

Tariffs have ‘collateral damage’

While tariffs’ protection may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper.

Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote.

These spillover effects hurt other sectors of the economy, ultimately costing jobs, economists said.  

Take steel, for example.

Steel tariffs raise production costs for the manufacturing sector and other steel-intensive U.S. industries, like automobiles, farming machinery, household appliances, construction and oil drilling, O’Neil and Huesa wrote.

China issues retaliatory tariffs

Cox studied the effects of steel tariffs imposed by former president George W. Bush in 2002-03, and found they were responsible for 168,000 fewer jobs per year in steel-using industries, on average — more jobs than there are in the entire steel sector.

Tariffs are a “pretty blunt instrument,” said Cox during a recent webinar for the Harvard Kennedy School.

They create “a lot of collateral damage,” she added.

Why tariffs are a ‘tax on exports’

Trucks head to the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Canada and Detroit, Michigan on March 4, 2025.

Bill Pugliano | Getty Images

Such damage includes retaliatory tariffs imposed by other nations, which make it pricier for U.S.-based exporters to sell their goods abroad, economists said.

Tariffs imposed during Trump’s first-term — on products like washing machines, steel and aluminum — hit $290 billion of U.S. imports with an average 24% tariff by August 2019, according to a 2020 paper published by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Those levies ultimately translated to a 2% tariff on all U.S. exports after accounting for foreign retaliation, it found.

“A tax on imports is effectively a tax on exports,” Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, wrote last year for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

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Damage to the U.S. economy from those first-term Trump tariffs “clearly” amounted to “many times” more than the wages of newly created jobs, economists Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, and Phil Gramm, a former U.S. senator (R-Texas), wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

(President Joe Biden kept most of Trump’s tariffs in place.)

U.S. trade partners have already begun fighting back against Trump’s recent tranche of tariffs.

China put tariffs of up to 15% on many U.S. agricultural goods — which are the largest U.S. exports to China — starting Monday. Canada also put $21 billion of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods like orange juice, peanut butter, coffee, appliances, footwear, cosmetics, motorcycles and paper products.

President Trump alluded to the potential economic pain of his tariff policies during his address to Congress.

“There will be a little disturbance, but we are okay with that,” he said. “It won’t be much.”

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While many economists don’t yet forecast a U.S. recession, Trump in a Fox News interview on Sunday didn’t rule out the possibility of a downturn as tariffs take effect — though he said the economy would benefit in the long term. If a recession were to happen, it would weigh on protected sectors, too, economists said.

Voters elected President Trump with a mandate to institute an economic agenda that includes tariffs, Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the White House, said in an e-mailed statement.

“Tariffs played a key role in the industrial ascent of the United States stretching back to the 1800s through William McKinley’s presidency,” Desai said.

‘Disappointing results’ of Trump-era tariff policies

There is a historical precedent for the trade war that’s breaking out: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, which triggered a reduction in exports and failed to boost agricultural prices for the farmers it sought to protect, Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote in a 2024 paper.

Economists also believe the Smoot-Hawley tariff exacerbated the Great Depression.

While a nearly century-old economic policy doesn’t necessarily point to what will happen in the modern era, protectionist policies from the post-2017 years have — like Smoot-Hawley — “had disappointing results,” Strain wrote.

Evidence from recent years suggests protectionism may actually hurt the workers it seeks to help, Strain said.

For example, Trump’s first-term tariffs reduced total manufacturing employment by a net 2.7%, Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, economists at the Federal Reserve Board, wrote in 2024. That’s after accounting for a 0.4% boost to employment in manufacturing jobs protected by tariffs, they found.

The 2018-19 trade war “failed to revive domestic manufacturing” and actually reduced jobs in the broad manufacturing sector, Strain wrote.

The share of U.S. employment coming from manufacturing jobs has been falling since the end of World War II, largely because technological advances have increased workers’ productivity, Strain said. It would be more helpful to direct economic policy toward connecting workers to jobs of the future, he said.

“Trade — like technological advances — is disruptive, but attempts to entomb the U.S. economy in amber are not a helpful response,” he wrote.

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Rules for repaying Social Security benefits just got stricter

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If you receive more Social Security benefits than you are owed, you may face a 100% default withholding rate from your monthly checks once a new policy goes into effect.

The change announced last week by the Social Security Administration marks a reversal from a 10% default withholding rate that was put in place last year after some beneficiaries received letters demanding immediate repayments for sums that were sometimes tens of thousands of dollars.

The discrepancy — called overpayments — happens when Social Security beneficiaries receive more money than they are owed.

The erroneous payment amounts may occur when beneficiaries fail to report to the Social Security Administration changes in their circumstances that may affect their benefits, according to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report. Overpayments can also happen if the agency does not process the information promptly or due to errors in the way data was entered, how a policy was applied or in the administrative process, according to the report.

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The Social Security Administration paid about $6.5 billion in retirement and disability benefit overpayments in fiscal year 2022, which represents 0.5% of total benefits paid, the Congressional Research Service said in its 2024 report. The agency also paid about $4.6 billion in overpayments for Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, benefits in that year, or about 8% of total benefits paid.

The Social Security Administration recovered about $4.9 billion in Social Security and SSI overpayments in fiscal year 2023. However, the agency had about $23 billion in uncollected overpayments at the end of the 2023 fiscal year, according to the Congressional Research Service.

By defaulting to a 100% withholding rate for overpayments, the Social Security Administration said it may recover about $7 billion in the next decade.  

“We have the significant responsibility to be good stewards of the trust funds for the American people,” Lee Dudek, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, said in a statement. “It is our duty to revise the overpayment repayment policy back to full withholding, as it was during the Obama administration and first Trump administration, to properly safeguard taxpayer funds.”

New overpayment policy goes into effect March 27

The new 100% withholding rate will apply to new overpayments of Social Security benefits, according to the agency. The withholding rate for SSI overpayments will remain at 10%.

Social Security beneficiaries who are overpaid benefits after March 27 will automatically be subject to the new 100% withholding rate.

Individuals affected will have the right to appeal both the overpayment decision and the amount, according to the agency. They may also ask for a waiver of the overpayment, if either they cannot afford to pay the money back or if they believe they are not at fault. While an initial appeal or waiver is pending, the agency will not require repayment.

Beneficiaries who cannot afford to fully repay the Social Security Administration may also request a lower recovery rate either by calling the agency or visiting their local office.

For beneficiaries who had an overpayment before March 27, the withholding rate will stay the same and no action is required, the agency said.

Some call 100% withholding rate ‘clawback cruelty’

The new overpayment policy goes into effect about one year after former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley implemented a 10% default withholding rate.

The change was prompted by financial struggles some beneficiaries faced in repaying large sums to the Social Security Administration.

At a March 2024 Senate committee hearing, O’Malley called the policy of intercepting 100% of a benefit check “clawback cruelty.”

At the same hearing, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Georgia, recalled how one constituent who was overpaid $58,000 could not afford to pay her rent after the Social Security Administration reduced her monthly checks.

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Following the Social Security Administration’s announcement that it will return to 100% as the default withholding rate, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare said it is concerned the agency may be more susceptible to overpayment errors as it cuts staff.

“This action, ostensibly taken to cut costs at SSA, needlessly punishes beneficiaries who receive overpayment notices — usually through no fault of their own,” the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, an advocacy organization, said in a statement.

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