Honey bee research is believed to be influenced dramatically by colony collapse 
disorder (CCD) and the sequenced genome release in 2006, but this assertion has 
never been tested. By employing text-mining approaches, research trends were 
tested by analyzing over 14,000 publications during the period of 1957 to 2017. 
Quantitatively, the data revealed an exponential growth until 2010 when the 
number of articles published per year ceased following the trend. Analysis of 
author-assigned keywords revealed that changes in keywords occurred roughly 
every decade with the most fundamental change in 1991-1992, instead of 2006. 
This change might be due to several factors including the research 
intensification on the Varroa mite. The genome release and CCD had quantitively 
only minor effects, mainly on honey bee health-related topics post-2006. Further 
analysis revealed that computational topic modeling can provide potentially 
hidden information and connections between some topics that might be ignored in 
author-assigned keywords.