It's happening everywhere.
A statistic that I stumbled across: not only the bees have declined, but the number of small hobbyist BEEKEEPERS has declined nationwide.
Since the European bee was domesticated, they've been kept as an integral part of agriculture, a healthy and essential part of the working farm. Maintaining a small population of bees free to roam at their leisure was a model that worked for centuries.
Increasingly today, almost to the exclusion of the traditional model, bees are kept on a commercial scale, the hives loaded on to trucks and driven from state to state to pollenate commercial crops. A week on oranges only, a week on almonds only, etc... Every time they can leave the hive, the landscape is completely different, the sights and scents completely alien. Is it any surprise that these colonies are collapsing en masse? A foraging bee on its own would visit many different species of plant in a day. If a human being ate nothing but chicken for a week, then nothing but lettuce another week, etc, wouldn't they be suffering from some nasty dietary deficiencies?
I think those concerned with the decline are just gonna have to roll up our sleeves and take matters into our own hands to keep honeybees around.
I'll probably have a top bar hive built and an order for Russian bees in for next spring.