Along with its annual report on the country's bee population, the United States Department of Agriculture's newest effort to rally support for the winged pollinators has taken flight: BeeCam.

The BeeCam is a continuous live Internet video stream -- broadcasting 24 hour a day, 7 days a week -- that focuses on the apiary, or bee yard, located in the USDA's People's Garden, which officially opened four years ago at the agency headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Accessible online at www.usda.gov/beewatch, the apiary currently includes two hives containing an estimated total 40,000 Italian queens and worker bees, the most common bee stock in the U.S. and the species used by many honey bee colonies throughout America.

"Helping pollinators is essential. That's why we've adopted pollinator-friendly gardening practices at USDA Headquarters and encourage you to do the same," explained a posting on the agency's Website. "We need pollinators to pollinate most of our flowering plants giving us the foods that give our diet nutrition, diversity and flavor."

The posting further notes the populations of "honeybees, native bees and other pollinators like birds, butterflies, beetles and bats have declined due to habitat loss, disease, adverse weather, and other conditions."

The USDA's yearly survey of beekeepers, released earlier this week, indicated the U.S. bee population suffered fewer colony losses this last winter than in recent years, but overall losses are still too high for sustainability.

The study showed total losses of managed honey bee colonies from all causes in 2013-14 were 23.2 percent nationwide, well over the 18.9 percent many in the beekeeping industry say should be the loss limit, to ensure population, and economic, stability.

Regardless, the latest statistics are a notable improvement from the 30.5 percent loss reported for the winter of 2012-2013, as well as the eight-year average loss of 29.6 percent.

"Healthy pollinator populations are critical to the continued economic well-being of agricultural producers," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. "While we're glad to see improvement this year, losses are still too high and there is still much more work to be done to stabilize bee populations."

Researchers who worked on the USDA report indicate there's so far no way to determine why the bees did better this year -- because there's too much data to consider.

"Yearly fluctuations in the rate of losses like these only demonstrate how complicated the whole issue of honey bee heath has become, with factors such as viruses and other pathogens, parasites like varroa mites, problems of nutrition from lack of diversity in pollen sources, and even sublethal effects of pesticides combining to weaken and kill bee colonies," said Jeff Pettis, co-author of the survey and research leader of the Agricultural Research Service Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, which is the USDA's chief scientific research agency for the bee industry.

Data from the USDA says that in October 2006, beekeepers began reporting losses of 30-90 percent of their hives, and while colony losses, particularly in winter months, are expected, the severity of losses back then was unusually high. The loss trend progressed over the years and has since been dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder.

The total number of managed honey bee colonies has dropped from 5 million in the 1940s to only about 2.5 million today, according to U.S. statistics.