Perhaps it is time to stop blaming the mites for the decline of the honeybees.
It was explained to me this is well planned and solved in Czechia. Varroa treatment is refunded my the government, but only one type of medication every 6 months. It's cheaper for beekeepers to use whatever the government gives them for free, than use something else. And the medication is free only for a few weeks, so everyone will use it at the same time.
The bees does need to evolve, but not to the point of producing venom. Mechanical mite removal works equally well.
And, by the way - natural pathogens exist in just about any population. These very, very rarely led to extinction. There is a media trend to claim the mites are at fault. This reminds me of prior fault yielding e. g. "mad cow disease" - and then the media also stopped doing any further investigation at that point. It's as if they have break points where you can not go past those points. Now it is the mites that get blamed.
You can also use drone frames, and remove drone brood during the summer, or cage the queen a period of time. These are both mechanical treatments and obviously doesn't hurt the honey.
All four reasons are linked to a decline habitats suitable for bees.
* Lose of natural habitats.
* Fertilization close to natural habitats causes grass to grow and outcompete bee friendly plants.
* Herbicides are killing flowers.
* Pesticides hurt wild bees (honeybees to a less extend).
What is killing bees more rapidly than anything is modern farming. When you see farmers, especially those in the US, needing to truck around bees it should be abundantly clear that something has gone very wrong. Massive fields and orchards with a single crop is no place for a bee, they simply have no food for the majority of the year. What do we expect bees to do with 50 acres of corn or wheat? To a bee that might as well be a desert.
Formic acid is one of the few treatments which is acceptable to use while honey is present.
"The peptides killed only the mites, while the bees survived."
What benefits do these new treatments offer? They certainly won't be cheaper.
https://www.honeybeesuite.com/can-powdered-sugar-control-var...
Edit: "Treatments every week killed more mites than treatments every two weeks, which killed more mites than treatments every month... The only treatment schedule that effectively suppressed mites over long periods was once per week... sugar dusting has been found to significantly reduce adult mite populations at times when little brood is present."
It is great and currently necessary we use them the way we do. It makes one wonder in the age of AI and evolving farm practices, can we start finding ways to cultivate already-climate-adapted native bees to do the work? Can we leverage adaptations for specific crops?
I get it that honeybees work great at pollinating monoculture fields, etc., but that does not change the fact we are perpetuating a square peg in round hole problem and pushing it very very far right now, at greater and greater cost, all while climate change is fighting us.
It's been over ten years since I spent any serious time with bees, but the bees themselves did a great job on the varroa mites. Sentinel bees at the hive entrance would pick the mites off the incoming bees. The problem was if the colony had a solid floor the mites would just climb back onto the next bee that passed nearby. If the solid colony floor was replaced with a mesh, the mites would fall through to the ground below while the bees could still go about their business.
We would still sometimes treat for varroa, but making it easier for the bees to handle varroa how they had evolved to was the first line of defence.
This was Canada, regular Italian bees, hard winter kills of whatever wasn't properly winterized.
Congratulations, I look forward to your Nobel prize.
Also, few native North American bee species are eusocial. That's another quality one would need to be able to use them the same way as commercial honeybees are used today.
The there is the issue of honey production.
https://academic.oup.com/jinsectscience/article/24/3/20/7683...
Humanity goes through seemingly endless cycles of poisoning ourselves: lead, cigarettes, leaded fuel, asbestos, CFCs, and countless others. It's highly improbable that this trend has ended. During each of these cycles is there tends to be science claiming something is safe when it ultimately turns out not to be. In part this is due to ignorance/arrogance, but it's also because those who earn a paycheck driven by these issues have a strong motivation to 'prove' that it's safe, especially when it's not.
[1] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/bee-alert-is-a-controversial-...
I don’t quite understand why there seems to be a pretty persistent thread around “honey bees are invasive and harm the ecosystem by stealing all the food from the native bees and doing all their pollination; that’s why they decline” - when at the same time the use of pesticides is so rampant that insects are literally gone entirely.
Honey bees are not great and reliable pollinators btw.
So the solution is: more genetically modified crops? More pesticides?
Unless “we need to stop our use of pesticides and we should also acknowledge that honey bees are an invasive species and consider making changes to the way we do monocultures” are in the same sentence this entire “honey bees are invasive” argument just feels super weird. Pesticides kill native pollinators. It’s not the honey bees.
Edit: and just to be clear - honey bees do not survive in the wild by themselves anymore due to varroa mites. They essentially depend on humans to protect them. That’s what the entire purpose of this article is about. So, if humans stopped keeping honey bees - they’d have a pretty hard time surviving in the wild on their own.
Neither are horses.
I guess the issue is you don't get honey with the native bees.
The removal of habitats suitable to insects and modern farming certainly plays a part as well.
Honeybees deal fairly well with pesticides, wild bees doesn't[1], but none of them can deal with losing habitats.
1) https://www.biavl.dk/medlemmer/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Bi... (In Danish).
Pollen can be carried (as noted by sibling and you) by lots of different insects, and there's myriad solitary and other (by conventional standards) weird bee species around, plus lots of plants are happy to pollinate themselves (tomato is a good example) or rely on wind (corn/maize is the famous example there).
When the common honeybee landed in the continental USA, about four centuries ago, the same people also brought in lots of (other) european plant species that had co-existed with Apis mellifera for millennia.
But yes, there are other pollinators like butterflies, moths, flies, birds, etc.
The horse ancestor species come from the Americas and migrated to Eurasia over the bearing land bridge.
Horses were only missing from North America for 10,000 of the last 50 million years.
Of all the examples to pick from, seeing GP picked horse made me wonder if GP was doing it for gits and shiggles.
Regenerative farming and/or permaculture offer ways to run industrial-scale agriculture without the monoculture. See i.e. https://peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10.24072/pcjournal...
Another innovation I see is the use of "crop tunnels" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytunnel) to greatly extend the growing season in colder climates (another poster mentioned "Ohio"), and/or better control evaporation.
But since European honey bees produce much more honey, the are the prefered species and used worldwide
> “We screened 50 venoms, mostly from spiders and scorpions, by applying them externally to the mites,” says Herzig.
> “We found more than 75% killed the mites within 24 hours. We selected 2 of the most potent spider venoms for further analysis.”(I mention this so more people can know the list exists. All are welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com when you see comments we should add!)
Your response is analogous to how people project onto vapid AI slop meaning which was not present in the process used to generate it. The primary difference being that there is a true meaning behind these words, something against which we can compare your reading. (I would like very much for your reading to turn out to be closer than my reading to what shevy-java intended to say, but I do not expect it.)
And assuming you get around this via grow lights, surely the energy and material cost goes up too much for high-volume crops to make economical sense.
If you're growing extreme-value crops - marijuana, or maybe exotic salad greens for Michelin-starred restaurants - that can actually work.
Otherwise, you're trying to compete with millions of square miles of naturally sun-lit dirt, and extremely efficient modern agro-tech stacks. Bankruptcy awaits.
> just technologist delusions of mine?
I'd bet you've read several articles about techno-utopians setting up vertical farms, and their grand dreams. Which always hand-wave the "how can this massively expensive setup complete with dirt?" part.
Farming sun-lit dirt does not magically require monoculture, nor poor farming practices. The problems is monoculture's appeal to certain human cultures - especially profit-maximizing "big ag" capitalists - and the agricultural policies enacted by naive politicians.
I thought this was very dependent on the species -- European honeybees did not evolve to deal with varroa mites, because the mites originated in Asia. Asian honeybees, and honeybees bred with them, do have better ways of dealing with the mite; you said regular Italian bees, were they really not hybridized?
I don't have any actual field experience here, just curious!
Also how cold does it get?
In my part of Ohio, we have lots of farmland -- and plenty of water that just falls out of the sky. We've got reasonably-long, generally-hot days during our growing season and we get some serious crop production done here while it lasts.
The rest of the year? The days are short. It's dark and cold outside; frozen, even. We can't grow crops outside here in the winter.
But vertical farms (eg, fancy greenhouses) can just keep going. With artificial light and/or supplemental heat, they're still producing even in the depths of winter.
Thus, I can go to the grocery store near my house and buy a locally-grown tomato in February. It's expensive to get this done, but the alternatives include paying someone to drive it up here from thousands of miles away or just going without a tomato until after things have warmed up again and stayed that way for awhile.
I recently did some research, and there are multiple local greenhouses around many large Canadian cities for just this reason. They are competitive in the winter, and sell to local supermarkets. The cost of the greenhouses vs shipping + loss.
And there is a loss in nutrition, when you harvest green and it takes weeks to hit the table, vs something picked yesterday and picked when actually ripe.
Of course, these are large warehouses, not typical greenouses.
So I guess the answer is, it can make sense in certain circumstances. A warmer place where you can grow fruit outside year round, not so much.
You're begging the question with this statement. Indoor growing is used when you don't have access to this kind of resource. There are many locations where access to land or suitable conditions is restricted.
CEA has been used profitably for a long time, and the most valuable crops are mushrooms and leafy greens, not exotic or illegal plants.
That said, varroa absolutely could overwhelm a colony. Then you had to report it, burn the infected colonies and wait for the inspectors. Not fun.
1. In late fall we'd make sure each colony had enough honey to fuel them through to spring (a quick lift would tell you). If short, we'd put sugar saturated water in a tray on top of the colony. The bees would move the sugar into the colony and a couple days later we'd take out the bone dry trays. Failing to ensure enough fuel meant certain death for the colony, though for some in the trade the math was that it was cheaper to buy nukes (a colony nucleus of a queen and some workers) in the spring. Our math was that We liked to have strong colonies in the spring to sell nukes.
2. A bee colony is basically a rectangular box sitting on a frame. We had rectangular insulation that stored flat but easily expanded to slide over each colony before the first snow. The colonies would get buried in snow, which was excellent extra insulation.
3. The bees themselves did the work to survive the winter. They'd huddle in a ball, burning honey to generate heat (a bee could heat itself to something like 40 degrees C), fanning their wings to spread the heat. The bees in the centre of the ball would move out to the periphery while those on the periphery would move into the center.
A cold snap that lasted too long was a disaster as the bees would tighten the ball for greater warmth and then run out of honey within the ball. Those colonies would die. In the spring you'd find the tightly clustered ball of bees, dead, surrounded by honey not that far outside the ball.
You needed at least one brief warming period in a cold snap in which the ball of bees would expand, find a new patch on unconsumed honey in the hive and then recontract around the honey.
If we did our work properly in the fall, we'd have 90% or more of our colonies make it to spring, most strong so we could make nukes to replace our losses and sell on the extras.
Peptides isolated from the venom of the Tasmanian cave spider and giant Japanese funnel-web spider are promising candidates for potential new treatments to protect honeybee hives from a deadly parasite.
Researchers tested spider and scorpion venoms for their ability to kill the Varroa destructor mite and published their findings in the journal npj drug discovery.
Study lead author Volker Herzig from the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Centre for Bioinnovation says the discovery is the first step in finding a new, environmentally friendly way to combat varroa mites which are destroying honeybee colonies across the globe.
The European honeybee (Apis mellifera) pollinates every continent except Antarctica. It is crucial for global food security, ecosystem stability and biodiversity.
V. destructor is found throughout Asia, much of Africa, Europe, the Americas, New Zealand and Australia. It feeds on honeybee larvae and pupae and carries viruses which affect the bees.
A varroa infestation will kill a honeybee colony if left untreated.
Synthetic pesticides called acaricides are currently used to control V. destructor. However, some populations have acquired resistance to acaricides which can also pollute honey and wax.
New bee-friendly treatment options are urgently needed.
“We screened 50 venoms, mostly from spiders and scorpions, by applying them externally to the mites,” says Herzig.
“We found more than 75% killed the mites within 24 hours. We selected 2 of the most potent spider venoms for further analysis.”
Tasmanian cave spiders (Hickmania troglodytes) commonly dwell in Tasmania’s underground drainage and cave systems. They prey on crickets, beetles, flies, millipedes and other spiders but are not dangerous to humans.
Giant Japanese funnel-web spiders (Gigathele gigas) are found in the Ryuku Islands and can have leg spans up to 15cm. You’d want to avoid being bitten by one of these big guys.
“We isolated a specific component, called a peptide, from each of these venoms and applied them to the bodies of varroa mites. The peptides killed only the mites, while the bees survived,” says Herzig.
“These peptides, which we named Ht1a and Gg1a, are fully biodegradable and our findings suggest they could be developed into a commercial, sustainable treatment for varroa mite infestations in honeybee hives.”
Herzig says next steps would include testing the peptides on honeybees carrying varroa mites and applying them in mite-infested beehives to assess how well they work under real world conditions.