my assumptions as to these reported numbers..
1) from the hobby to side liner part of beekeeping we do have many many more of these and what proportion of TOTAL NUMBERS they represent is anyone's guess. I do think that this proportion of the beekeeping community is more likely to respond to survey than the commercial beekeeping crowd and their 'loss' number is likely to be much more accurate than the commercial crowd.
2) it appears there are also more commercially held bee hives than just a few years ago. these appear to be younger folks who have taken up beekeeping chasing the pollination dollars. as such they may not be as experienced as commercial beekeeper from even a few years back. another often overlooked factor is in migratory/pollination type commercial beekeeping you do experience and uneven loss every time you move the bees. most times this loss is small but if thing go badly the numbers can spike wildly. as an example when I did the commercial migratory thing we calculated a 5% loss each time we put them on a semi and moved them north and south. reasonable if you moved bees multiple times in the same year this loss is additive with the more time you move them the larger the number gets. as suggest before if things went wrong (you got caught in heavy traffic that didn't move for half a day in hot weather or if you got caught in a snow storm) single load loss could jump to 100%.
