Numlock News: May 27, 2026 • Flowers, Bees, Honey

May 27, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Beltsville

In a move that will have significant implications for agriculture, the USDA is working to decommission the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, citing building maintenance and renovations that will cost $500 million. That said, the closure of the lab could have massive costs for farmers and consumers across the board, in no small part because it’s the home of the nation’s premier bee research and disease diagnosis hub. Honey bees alone contribute $15 billion to U.S. crop production annually, pollinating 130 types of crops, and Beltsville has played a massive role in diagnosing what ails them; In the early 2000s, researchers there helped respond to the varroa mites driving colony losses, and its currently helping beekeepers prepare for Tropilaelaps mercedesae, a mite that has infested honey bees in Asia.

Jennie L. Durant, The Conversation

Sky High Rockets In Flight

A new analysis from Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell found that the number of rocket bodies disposed into orbit from China has reached alarming levels. For much of the early years of spaceflight, the destiny of the upper rocket stages was not really a matter of concern, until it became clear that they would remain in erratic orbits for decades that could spell serious problems for other inhabitants of Earth’s orbit. Over the past two decades, countries and private companies have worked to ensure that upper rocket stages are disposed of at a point where they will fall back to Earth predictably. Owing to decades of exploration, the Soviet Union and Russia have 800 metric tons of rocket bodies in long-lived orbits between 600 kilometers and 2,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface, while the United States has about 57 metric tons, two figures that have held steady or declined for years. China, meanwhile, has seen its rocket body mass rise sharply, from less than 100 metric tons five years ago to 252 metric tons today.

Eric Berger, Ars Technica

Honey

Americans are consuming more honey per capita than ever before, as of 2024, consuming 1.6 pounds of it per year, up from 1.3 pounds a decade before that and 0.9 pounds per capita as of two decades ago. Honey is pretty much an ideal substance for consumer brands, as it’s a high-calorie sweetener that is somehow perceived to be healthy, with people using words like “antioxidants” next to the sucrose-dense syrup to give it a bit of a halo. In the 12 months ending March, Americans bought $1.6 billion worth of honey, up 10 percent year over year.

Illena Peng, Bloomberg

Flowers

1-800-Flowers saw revenue decline 11.6 percent in the quarter ending in March, posting a net loss of $100.1 million. The brand has shed market share among online flower shops, dropping to nine percent from 14.3 percent as of 2022. New competition, plus brick-and-mortar shops getting savvier when it comes to tech, has eaten into the margins of the big online players. One reality for the online flower business is these companies forking over a ton of money to referrers. The CEO cited that 1-800-Flowers might pay $40 for a transaction, and make only a $20 margin on it, meaning that the biggest beneficiary of that bouquet was not the recipient, nor the florist, nor the brand, but probably Google.

Megan Graham, The Wall Street Journal

Tees

A new analysis found that lots of the material that going into T-shirt manufacturing is wasted as a result of the manufacturing process. The study found that about 44 percent of the material consumed in the production of a tee is discarded as waste during the production stages. This means that while there’s substantial attention on the stat that less than one percent of used clothing is recycled into new textiles globally — and that a maximum of 14 percent of the original fibers in a new T-shirt might be able to be recycled or reused — at the end of the day, much of the material is already in the dump before the shirt is even sold.

Steinar Brandslet, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Papers

A 2022 guidance memo, the Nelson Memo, called for making all taxpayer-funded research papers and data free to access, and a new analysis published by the Government Accountability Office has put a price tag on that. Publishers charge authors an average of over $3,000 for each article that they make immediately free to read, and those fees have increased in previous years. The analysis looked at nine agencies that fund research, the NIH and NSF among them, and found that the government’s bill for such publishing fees would reach $937 million by 2030.

Jeffrey Brainard, Science

Airlines

While China’s airline industry is growing, that growth is projected to slow from 215 new jet purchases this year to 192 new jets in 2035. One reason for the slowed growth is China’s high speed rail, which is able to compete with regional airline traffic on price. There are currently 4,200 aircrafts in service in China, and this fact has prompted some aircraft manufacturers and suppliers to expand their maintenance work in China. While new sales will be harder to come by, those existing fleets won’t be getting any younger: the 1,830 Boeing aircraft in service in China is already an average 12.7 years old, and Airbus’ fleet is an average of 9.4 years old.

Wataru Suzuki, Nikkei Asia

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