Why do your numbers above not match the ones in the abstract at all?

There were 7425 valid respondents (7123 backyard, 190 sideline, and 112 commercial beekeepers)

First they need to separate out experienced beekeepers from those without experience particularly when they have such a disparity in respondents. For experienced beekeepers with a possible team to lose hives is a much greater issue to the actual problem than Joe who bought hives last spring and doesn't know what he is doing. When you have over 7,000 backyard beekeepers responding the numbers are going to be very skewed to the inexperienced. We have over 100 new beekeepers in our county alone every year, most lose their bees over the winter. Its not a larger problem its their lack of education that kills them.

They need to do month to month gains and losses, not "winter" and "summer" by arbitrary dates. Ask the respondent when they feel their winter season ends and begins for their area or do it based on zip code and determine it for them based on the average last freeze/frost date. Which of course gets really hard in the case of the migratory commercial guys who might be moving from winter to summer back to winter.

66 % of all beekeepers had higher losses than they deemed acceptable.

This is a bullshit question. If I make money on beekeeping any loss is unacceptable because it cuts into my profits. Hell even if I'm a backyard beekeeper and love my bees any loss can be devastating and unacceptable. 7000 backyard keepers are not going to provide an unbiased answer or even financially sensible answer here there are going to provide an emotionally charged one.

They need to ask about gains also. Last year I made splits in Feb, and lost nucs from those splits before April 1 (my inexperience and lack of looking at the weather before I left town). They would count that as winter losses. I could easily envision a situation where I could report 100% loss yet still have hives by splitting early and losing all the splits but retaining the parent hives.

They would also count as a loss consolidating 2 hives in late Oct. Its not a loss, its good management. Their definition of loss should not be "did you go down in the number of hives" it should be "did a hive die/abscond/collapse despite your best management efforts". But then I don't think they are trying to grasp the actual problem. They are trying to sensationalize losses, any losses, and they have designed a survey to do just.