When honey bees are dwindling, pretty much all the insects are too.
The Bee Apocalypse has not gone anywhere, it's just still here, and it is in fact an Insect Apocalypse, which is many orders of magnitude worse.
These bastards seem to hunt baby grasshoppers all day long and butcher all kinds of other wasps and bees, too. I used to find piles of chopped bodies but until competition got the message and show no more. I even found a stash of dead spiders they've managed to build inside a cupboard.
I am starting to get worried.
I do observe other changes in different species but this one is the wildest I've got. Haven't seen a big grasshopper in a decade. My cat used to hunt them all night. What changed? I don't know. Firebugs used to cover some trees in red 3 summers ago. Haven't seen one in months.
Edit: as to why I am replying to your post? I liked it so much, I decided to share my extremely limited experience.
But what you are seeing can also be a case of climate change moving the habitats of species around, and make them live where they did not live before (because also prevent them from living anymore where they had always been living).
Edit: thanks for the compliment :D
Just for the record, I'm an insects lover (also more generally a lover of Nature). And the situation is making me very, very sad.
Some years you will see huge winged ants, other years will be heavy with mosquitoes, other years will have giant hornets.
It was quite a small-scale wasp, a black one with narrow white stripes, but its technique was very good. It just dropped next to where I was sitting holding its prey which was trying to escape.
* Not yet, and hopefully I won't have to
Lichen indicators for air pollution are fascinatingly more complicated than that. Certain lichens respond positively to air pollution due to excess nutrients like ammonia and nitrates in the air. Imagine an algal bloom but the nutrient pollution is in the air instead of in the water. The US Forest Service produced an interesting video overviewing these phenomena.
Air Pollution & Lichens: A Tour of the Columbia River Gorge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3dPrgAkN3M
It seems they are not dwindling.
That was one of the clarifications of the piece. The bigger concern is the number of species rather than the number of honeybees.
But in case it would "seem to get better" (e.g. in the US), I agree:
if honey bees are dwindling at some point (the wake up call), it shows that there is a bigger concern, but the bigger concern is still there even if we see again honey bees, it's an insect apocalypse (and we'll always see honey bees anyway, because they are actively bred by humans using nutrients grown with intrants from good ol' fossil fuel energy and all).
This is caused by the insect apocalypse.
It's because the harm caused to the bees is from factors that strike as well other insects: mainly pesticides, and global warming.
Honestly it's such a dirty metric with so many compounding variables I'm shocked that anybody is seriously considering it as a meaningful data point beyond the most basic, surface-level understanding of the issue. To be honest the whole thing reeks of the usual hacker-news crowd issue where people want to pretend they know about a topic (e.g. systemic issues in pollinator/agricultural pest population management in high-intensity modern industrial agriculture) but are underestimating the complexity of the issues by a huge magnitude.
You know, it is just a matter of knitting all of our knowledge bits together. Lots of nasty chemicals in the environments, especially design to harm insects. Add to that anormal temperatures and rain levels.