Posted by pseudolus 4 days ago
https://sweetharvestfoods.com/the-commercial-honey-bee-trave...
That sounds like a great opportunity to spread the resistant parasites from hive to hive and region to region.
Fishing vessels are spreading parasites at hyper-accelerated speeds. This happens when they clean the guts of infected fish at sea without prior treatment and when they discard untargeted fish in the same way; The parasites disperse exponentially, within a loop, when such parasitised food spreads through the trophic. This has already happened on a planetary level.
Also, to note, I think that if they start droping frozen guts into the sea as a treatment, our main defensive barrier at home (to froze fish some days before consumption) will eventually disappear when the parasites adapt (ie. not freezing them long enough until they die due neglect, would progressively disperse freeze-resistant strains in the wild).
I thought the main barier is to apply intense heat to the fish, not to freeze it.
I doubt that there's any hope at all of controlling mites in free-roaming honeybees. I'd wager that we've done damage with overuse of miticides (which are insecticides, btw -- the article doesn't connect those dots) in a misguided attempt to control nature.
https://www.greenlightbiosciences.com/in-the-pipeline-protec...
Probably the better solution here is to stop trying to do industrial farming of bees, and move to a system where local populations of pollinators are cultivated and maintained year round. But sure, RNAi is probably better than the chemicals they're using now.
Consider Amitraz [1]. It is both an insecticide and a miticide, and the method of action is on the central nervous system. Fluvalinate [2], another common one, is also broadly toxic to many different organisms.
I'm more interested in no longer spreading the mite gene(s) for pesticide immunity across the country.
The resistance genes are not spreading due to physical transport, they’re spreading because of evolutionary selection.
Regardless, I think we both agree that the extremely unnatural pressures of industrial agriculture are a root cause here.
For example, Scandinavian countries that have made a concerted effort to only prescribe antibiotics to humans when they are medically necessary saw the genes for antibiotic resistance becoming less prevalent.
Unfortunately, America still allows agribusiness to feed livestock a constant stream of lower dose antibiotics, because doing so makes animals more efficient at turning feed into muscle.
It might appear to be lush nature, but the places we farm are deserts in many ways. We kill insect life, birds, mammals, and other supporting species. We remove most of nutrients from the soil and replace them chemically. A commercial orchard might as well be an Amazon datacenter from an environmental standpoint.
If we want to change things, we need to fundamentally alter the way we grow food. It will be a bit harder -- we'll need regenerative methods, less reliable methods, more human labor, more weed prone, etc. -- but we can build food production into something that's much more sustainable and ecologically sound.
Some farmers are already doing this, or experimenting with it, and I think there's at the very least a growing soil health mindset among small farmers.
Many people don't realize that honeybees are not native to North America. Bringing them in massive numbers crowds out the native species and causes further ecosystem breakdown. It's good that people now understand that pollinators are important and insects need to be protected. But that means prioritizing the health of native species and creating a healthier ecosystem from the ground up (literally).
Livestock is as GMO as they come, just on a longer scale.
Have a few pigs rummaging around your food forest? Some sheep to keep grasses and weeds in check? Some poultry to remove pests and aerate the soil? Sure! Love that, it's using behaviors in complementary ways to create a healthier system.
Cram thousands of animals into cubes and process them with machinery? Truly awful in my view.
It seems the baseline drifts and we could stand to take certain environmental cycles and/or livestock lifecycles for granted as though they exist purely through evolution or untouched ecological processes.
It is possible to have local beekeepers who don't ship their hives across the country, and there are still untended wild hives. Those seem to be in better shape.
The genetic research seems to point to the opposite happening - that because of pressures on honey bees from pesticides or pests ( and thereby viral pressure carried by various pests ) the feral and commercial populations track quite closely.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8991 - there's a lot here specifically relevant to this discussion but especially note the emergence of African Honey Bee genotype in wild populations. This paper is from 2015 analyzing the biodiversity response to the arrival of V. destructor ( varroa mites ) and Africanized bees were introduced in the early 1990s as well.
The take-away is that until you have a 3 mile separation of water, assume that populations of bees in a land area are more related than not and face similar pressures in a given climate, whether feral or managed. Honey Bees especially ( but of course every living thing ) should be managed with an ecosystem mindset.
a) African honey bees aren't domesticated populations, challenging your overall point.
b) A 3 mile separation is not substantial (though I grant you that if most of the bees in any given cluster are introduced, then it might lead to more homogeneity).
c) even within "wild" populations of whatever, you see local clusters of genetic similarity. It's been a while since I took population genetics, but IIRC this kind of local equilibrium was well-covered.
Also, I haven't read the paper, but the abstract sure sounds like what I'm describing -- a sudden population bottleneck leads to rapid evolutionary adaptation in wild populations:
"These findings suggest that genetically diverse honey bee populations can recover from introduced diseases by evolving rapid tolerance, while maintaining much of the standing genetic variation."
There isn't a reporting structure for hobbyists. Look down-thread for an example of a hobbyist who lost their hive (and whose neighbor lost their hive).
This isn't limited to big operators.
If it's a collapse it seems like a slow collapse.
These companies are likely aren't saving more than a few percentage by centralizing and distributing.
As soon as that gene arises, spreading it across the country becomes a bad idea.
im not providing anything to anyone. i live with this statement as a fact. i will not comment anymore in this discussion. be(e) free to downvote.
I agree that keeping mites under controls is tricky at best, but I've never heard of anyone using a pesticide. Normal practise, even for commercial beekeepers is to use oxalic acid. That's not really something mites become resistant to. The other option is brood control, where you basically do a period of time with no brood, leaving the mites without the ability to reproduce. I can see the later not being tricky for commercial beekeepers as that is a lot of hives to manage. The same goes for removing drone brood during the summer, it helps a lot, but I wouldn't want to do it to hundreds of hives.
More and more I feel like the right option is the breeding of mite restistant bees, but that would entail doing nothing for a long period of time or crossing European honeybees with Asian varieties that can remote the mites themselves. The work is already being do, but it's still years away. We have found wild beehives, including abandoned beehives, which are fairly mite resistant.
It seems that some Apis Cerana (Japonica?) are fairly mite-resistant; they bite and kill the mites (except for those within the drone cells, as far as I read). This, could be combined also with rising the hive temperature along two hours to temperatures able to kill the mites, included the ones within the cells.
PS: I have only read a little about the matter.
Or if you have no brood for a period of time, I can see that this would decrease the mite population in the empty hive, but wouldn't the brood carry the mites with them wherever they have gone?
(these are serious questions, not challenges)
For brood control, you have two options. One is to insert special frames in the hive, these are designed to encourage drone brood to go in those frames. Mites (Verrora) attack drone brood more as the cells are bigger and can better accommodate the mites. So you concentrate the mites in those frames. Then every week you remove 1/3 of those frames and discard it. That's normally enough to keep the mites at bay. The second option is to trap the queen, she stays in the hive, but she's restricted from moving around and laying eggs, i.e. you keep her away from the cells in the frames. A brood cycle is 28 days, but mites don't live that long. Without any new brood continuously cycling, they can't reproduce as they mature in the brood cells. The down side is obviously a large temporary drop in you bee population, meaning less pollination, and less honey. I don't know many who do this, but from what I'm told it is very effective. I my guess is that you probably only want to do this to fairly strong/highly populaces hives.
The acid and drone frames are normal practise, carried out by all beekeepers. Minus those who experiment with breeding mite resistant bees.
So the hive is never empty, you just create an environment that's harmful to the mites. Either by being to acidic or not providing a place for their eggs to hatch.
> While viruses are a likely end-stage cause of colony death, other stressors such as nutritional stress and agrochemicals may have also played significant roles.
because their study just cannot tease apart the origin cause due to selection bias in the methodology. That isn't the point of their study. Their hypothesis was that miticide resistant varroa were killing (possibly already compromised) bees due to novel viruses and pathogens. Thus the use of current miticides won't help colony collapse.
In [1] he can not detect the Varroa within the hive, nevertheless he notice the behavior of the hive is as if it had it. In [2] the hive is already dead, then is when he find the Varroa. In the comments on [2], one beekeeper explains that when the combs are twisted the mites fall into the combs rather than onto the floor which is traditionally used to detect them ( The sugar [3] or CO2 technique to detect Varroa in any type of hive is recommended by other beekeepers in the comments).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYKL7hrp23k HIIVE Confusion
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsdHyRdpfB0 All the bees dead - why Varroa was so treacherous here
[3] By comments on other videos about the topic, this needs around 200 bees which are placed in a container with grids to which sugar is added. When shaken, the Verroa falls and a count can be made. The topology of this hive makes it difficult to gather this amount of bees (in the video [2] one can see that the hive would have to be dismantled).
Can heat pumps be scaled down to that size?
You wouldn't need an HVAC per hive, but rather 1 HVAC for the swarm. Get a water mass, HVAC it to the right temperature, and then pump the water through the hives to maintain a good temp.
It'd be somewhat more expensive and you'd have to have enough insulation to make sure the water isn't prematurely cooling before reaching the hive.
Hives also tend to be really cheap. They are simply wood boxes. So you'd be competing with $100 wood box with $200 wood box and $1000 HVAC and plumbing.
IIRC they are _massively_ less efficient. Relevant Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnMRePtHMZY
kiss
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher
Perforated Double Skinned Exterior
Lots of cool tech from the past
Who benefits most from old methods and tech remaining a historical footnote, but the very people selling their new whiz-bang solutions for modern problems, which are themselves inherent to using their products and energy production and consumption supply chain?
The one presentation I recall from that far back was a bee researcher that basically said exactly what you posted, whenever his team investigated colony collapses from varroa mites (as opposed to poor treatment from being moved to California), they’d find markers for multiple previously unknown viruses. Honeybees were basically having to contend with previously isolated viruses they never evolved to resist, all at once.
I also remember the xerces society trying protest and interrupt his talk because they wanted to blame (and therefore ban) pesticides only, specifically neonicotinoids. I generally really appreciate the work they do, but in this case they really came away as being dogmatic instead of helpful.
What gets less attention though are the many dozens of native pollinator bees that also were/are hard hit and driven to full/near extinction. These species also have to contend with food source loss, because they are very selective about the flowers they will pollinate because the require a certain nutritional profile. I can’t stop viruses or varroa mites, but I can at least recommend planting wildflower mixes native to your local area.
edit Rediscovered some old blog posts I found looking into the issue at the time and found enlightening. It’s a great example of the observation work that makes a good agronomist. Bear in mind these are from 2012, so no idea if they’ve updated their thoughts to something different.
https://scientificbeekeeping.com/the-extinction-of-the-honey...
https://scientificbeekeeping.com/neonicotinoids-trying-to-ma...
These chemicals would have lasted much longer and resistance would have been much slower in coming (if ever) if they were kept in reserve rather than used by default...
It's asif nobody learned anything from monsanto
Well, then, we're fucked.
> Viruses and vectors tied to honey bee colony losses
> Zachary S. Lamas, Frank Rinkevich, Andrew Garavito, Allison Shaulis, Dawn Boncristiani, Elizabeth Hill, Yan Ping Chen, Jay D. Evans