Yep, Rancher needs to go talk with the part of the family that actually is keeping bees, "how it was" 15-20 years ago, "aint" like it is now..
I AM that part of the family. Bee numbers went down with the drought. Now they are back in record numbers. Hence the complaints about them. That data posted was about "honey producing colonies". That has absolutely nothing to do with bee numbers. But explaining data to you is probably futile.
Bee numbers fell nationwide, drought has little to do with it other than regionally. The issues facing honey producing hives, also effect feral hives, that is why there is so much hope that feral bees can find a way to combat the newer problems by many beeks
Then the answer to all bee problems are in the Texas hill country, and evidently the cure is spreading toward the coast according to the OP.
In the hill country this year bees were WAY over carrying capacity. I posted about it earlier back in cold weather. Literally hundreds of bees in every deer feeder. Leave a corn sack, chicken feed sack or any source of grain open for more than 3 minutes and there would be bees swarming all over it.
I had an 80+ year old bee keeper call me a liar when I told him the above. So I videoed pouring corn into a bucket. Within 1.5 minutes bees were all over it. He apologized. Evidently grain dust is a substitute for pollen.
Bees were starving because their numbers were way over carrying capacity and it was that way on most of the hill country.
Two years of plentiful rain pushed bee populations to levels not seen by an octagenarian bee keeper. May not have been the drought. But someone is skewing the data. The bees don't lie.