I ask&#x2F;say this in every honey bee thread:<p>My understanding is that feral honey bees have been extinct in North America for a long time (since the 1980s?), and that they&#x27;re an introduced species. The logic then goes: if you see a honey bee flying around outside, it at some point belonged to a honey bee keeper.<p>I&#x27;m also of the impression that (a) the costs for pollination services haven&#x27;t shot up in conjunction with colony collapse disorder (CCD), and that CCD is defined in terms of an increase in colonies that fail to overwinter. It&#x27;s not, the logic goes, as if all the honey bee colonies fail; they just seem to be more fragile.<p>There&#x27;s also a market for queens to start new colonies with, and my understanding was that the market for these queens hasn&#x27;t gotten crazy in response to CCD.<p>I think I got a bunch of this stuff from EconTalk a few years ago, in an interview with a &quot;honey bee economist&quot;.<p>Are these assumptions still valid?