A lot has changed since Doug Hoffman began raising honeybees on his northwest Indiana farm a decade ago. The insects are good at pollinating crops, but he’s losing more and more of them each year.

“I’ve always been fascinated by them,” Hoffman said. “You take a colony of bees — they could kill you — and yet man still wants to work with them… It’s the coolest creature I’ve ever been around.”

Hoffman, like many other farmers in Indiana and across the country, has fewer of the insects to work with. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were approximately 6,500 honeybee colonies in Indiana as of Jan. 1, 2016, a 28 percent drop from the prior year. Nationwide, those colonies declined by 8 percent last year.

Honeybees serve a vital purpose in the agriculture industry. They pollinate blueberries, several varieties of squash, melons, pumpkins, gourds, cucumbers and bell peppers, among other crops. They fly from plant to plant collecting pollen and nectar to feed on and produce honey in their hives. In doing so, pollen from reproductive organs of plants sticks to the bees’ bodies before they head to other plants, where that pollen rubs off and results in the fertilization needed for ideal fruit development.

Hoffman told the Logansport, Indiana Pharos-Tribune that a typical field needs a minimum of 100 honeybee hives, placed strategically, to facilitate adequate pollination. Each hive, he said, contains between 30,000 and 100,000 bees.

“For adequate pollination, you need to have a bee flying every 10 seconds in three square meters,” he said.

Hoffman said he’s experienced significant bee losses since starting his business, Apple Blossom Honey Farm.

“When I first got started about 10 years ago, I was losing about 15 to 25 percent,” he said. “Our losses now are closer to 58 percent. That’s a big difference.”

Insecticides are responsible for the bulk of his bee loss, he continued.

When a honeybee gets poisoned by insecticide, they’ll often make it back to the hive but die at the entrance, Hoffman said.

“You’ll have piles of dead bees, just piles of them,” he said.

When that happens, he’ll take samples, observe them through a microscope and send them to a laboratory in Maryland, being sure to document everything as he goes.

If there’s evidence of insecticide, he’ll consult with a state chemist on how to proceed.

The culprit is often drift, or an unintentional diffusion of insecticides, Hoffman said.

“A farmer can hit you once with insecticide and drift and they get a slap on the hand,” he continued. “The second time can be a severe fine and I don’t mean a few thousand dollars, I mean it can be tens of thousands. A third time, they can actually prosecute them.”

The USDA attributed a significant amount of Indiana’s honeybee loss to varroa mites — parasites that infect the bees with disease.

Varroa mites were reported at more than 17 percent of honeybee colonies during the first quarter of 2016 and more than 20 percent during the first quarter of 2015, according to the news release.

Hoffman said he’ll run into varroa mites from time to time, adding the parasites will sicken the bees and cause deformities in their wings, keeping them from food.

The mites are controllable, however. Setting a bar of formic acid on top of a hive will drive them out without affecting the bees, he continued.

“It’s something you have to stay on top of,” he said.

One solution, Hoffman says, may reside with the insecticides used on certain crops.

“The farmer’s got to make a living,” Hoffman said as the bees buzzed around him in his shop recently. “We all eat from what the farmer gives us and what the bees give the farmer also gives it that chain reaction.

“If there is a balance of chemical companies getting together and saying, ‘Let’s protect the bee, let’s use more bee-friendly products,’ then we wouldn’t see these problems.”

The Logansport, Indiana Pharos-Tribune contributed to this story.