The real story of honey bees and a straw man from Anthony Watts at WUWT

Any time there's a chance to reject science, Anthony Watts will grab it with both hands. Today he's decided to build a strawman out of bees. He's found a rather shallow article at Washington Post, which looks to me to have a lot wrong with it. The article was about how beekeepers have managed to rebuild the honey bee population in the USA. It's not yet back to its heyday of 1990, however it's increased from the low days of 2006 by about 20%. Close to the end of the article, a couple of economists are quoted cheerily calling the recovery "a victory for the free market", oblivious to the government support that helped address all the huge problems.

Anthony Watts' strawman

Anthony Watts wrote the headline: "Bee-pocaclypse called off, bees doing OK, global warming was never a cause" and referred to an old article from Wired. I say he referred to it, but he didn't link to it, he just copied and pasted a snapshot of the headline. That very short 2007 Wired article was about an article at Salon. That Salon article in turn was about how scientists were starting to look into the massive decline in the US population of honeybees. There were a lot of possible reasons put forward in the Salon article, but at the time (2007), all the research wasn't in.

Needless to say, Anthony Watts didn't give any insight into US honey bees. He doesn't do background research. His forte is copying and pasting slabs of text pinched from somewhere or other, putting his "claim" dogwhistle headlines on top of scientific press releases, and promoting logical fallacies and wacky climate conspiracy theories.