Varroa

[user 6228]

What can I say, millions of years of evolution maybe we should leave it down to natural selection as we might be doing more harm than good?

read this paper about wild bees surviving with Varroa without human intervention by Prof Tom Seeley
http://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/abs/2007/01/m6063/m6063.html

 

[Finman]

.
Beekeeping before varroa arrive to district:

A case 1990. 8 box hive which had Italian queen and drones were Black bees.

Prepare to open hive

- comb in your pocket, with which you can comb bees from your hair

- look tight willow bushes, via which you run when your protection fails

- put smoker on opposite side of hive, and when bees attack onto the smoker, that while you load boxes back and then quickly into the car

When varroa arrived, this fun stopped like against wall.

 

[Hebeegeebee]

I treat my bees against Varroa annually , I know they are in there!
I have ( due to the vagaries of the weather) missed treating the odd colony and been shocked by the rapid increase of varroa numbers in said colonies.

We have to remember that it is Apis cerana that has developed a coping strategy helped no doubt by time (we haven't got) and the fact that the cerana drone is the same size as mellifica worker .
Yes pheromones play their part but honestly ,as a forum frequented by mainly hobbyist Beekeepers I think we should be actively encouraging treatment and let those of the leave alone persuasion to get on with their experiments rather than push their theories to the hobbyist in general!
Point being ,the average beekeeper isn't equipped to sustain the inevitable losses .
Bees rob and bees rob from weak failing varroa devastated colonies .
It's ok testing theory in isolation but inflicting the failing colonies onto surrounding apiaries is plain selfish and foolish I may add!
I have no wish to start WW3 but I feel it time I put my opinion to the forum!
VM


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I don't disagree.

 

[Finman]

read this paper about wild bees surviving with Varroa without human intervention by Prof Tom Seeley
http://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/abs/2007/01/m6063/m6063.html

There is a fresh reseach about British wild honey bee hives by Catherine Thompson .
No wild colony lived over 3 years.

But if honeybee colonies do not die, 100 colonies will be after

5 years .....24 000 colonies
after 10 years ..6 million
after 12 years...54 million
after 15 years.....1,4 billion colonies

 

[TryingToLetThemBee]

There is a fresh reseach about British wild honey bee hives by Catherine Thompson .
No wild colony lived over 3 years.

But if honeybee colonies do not die, 100 colonies will be after

5 years .....24 000 colonies
after 10 years ..6 million
after 12 years...54 million
after 15 years.....1,4 billion colonies

Yes: no-one ever talks about that when discussing colony losses. So if there were one resistant colony when varroa first arrived in the UK, and varroa was completely unmanaged, then the place would be repopulated with resistant bees, but at the cost of a huge "hole" in bee population in the meantime. So the trick, and we are probably somewhere in that region, is to allow evolutionary pressure AND manage the hole. So we need untreated and/or unmanaged colonies AND treated colonies. Plus the debate is a great source of fights ... I'm just not an optimist that we have already got resistant/hygienic/co-evolved bees or whatever yet.

 

[user 6228]

There is a fresh reseach about British wild honey bee hives by Catherine Thompson .
No wild colony lived over 3 years.

But if honeybee colonies do not die, 100 colonies will be after

5 years .....24 000 colonies
after 10 years ..6 million
after 12 years...54 million
after 15 years.....1,4 billion colonies

1) cite the research paper, the devil is in the detail
2) the rest of your post is a logical fallacy.

you remove the bounds from an assertion, prove the unbounded assertion false and then assert the original bounded assertion false.

 

[user 6228]

Yes: no-one ever talks about that when discussing colony losses. So if there were one resistant colony when varroa first arrived in the UK, and varroa was completely unmanaged, then the place would be repopulated with resistant bees, but at the cost of a huge "hole" in bee population in the meantime. So the trick, and we are probably somewhere in that region, is to allow evolutionary pressure AND manage the hole. So we need untreated and/or unmanaged colonies AND treated colonies. Plus the debate is a great source of fights ... I'm just not an optimist that we have already got resistant/hygienic/co-evolved bees or whatever yet.

Another false premise you are assuming the only means of a colony survival is one of:
1) resistant by whatever means bees
2) treatment

there are at least two other potential mechanisms:

a) avirulence ... the varroa slow down their breeding to allow their host and themselves to survive.
b) higher humidity nests caused by various means reducing the success rate of varroa breeding.

In some cases bees are surviving well enough alongside varroa, but why? thats the real question and it may have more than one answer

 

[Finman]

you remove the bounds from an assertion, prove the unbounded assertion false and then assert the original bounded assertion false.

Don't be afraid. It was only calculation with excell, +300% annually
It is 2 swarms every year from colony.

 

[Tom Bick]

There is a fresh reseach about British wild honey bee hives by Catherine Thompson .
No wild colony lived over 3 years.

But if honeybee colonies do not die, 100 colonies will be after

5 years .....24 000 colonies
after 10 years ..6 million
after 12 years...54 million
after 15 years.....1,4 billion colonies

If only life was so simple.

To post that makes me think about all your work at university??

 

[user 6228]

Don't be afraid. It was only calculation with excell, +300% annually
It is 2 swarms every year from colony.

Please try to use some reasoned logic rather than rhetorical devices.

 

[Finman]

there are at least two other potential mechanisms:

a) avirulence ... the varroa slow down their breeding to allow their host and themselves to survive.

b) higher humidity nests caused by various means reducing the success rate of varroa breeding.

There are quite much research about tolerancy againts varroa. NO research mention that "humidity" thing, except that one reaseach in tropic.

The basic is Natural Hygienic Behaviour, where 6 genes are known to affect.

Abstract 2010

Honeybee hygienic behaviour provides colonies with protection from many pathogens and is an important model system of the genetics of a complex behaviour. It is a textbook example of complex behaviour under simple genetic control:

hygienic behaviour consists of two components
-uncapping a diseased brood cell,
- followed by removal of the contents-
-each of which are thought to be modulated independently by a few loci of medium to large effect.

A worker's genetic propensity to engage in hygienic tasks affects the intensity of the stimulus required before she initiates the behaviour. Genetic diversity within colonies leads to task specialization among workers, with a minority of workers performing the majority of nest-cleaning tasks. We identify three quantitative trait loci that influence the likelihood that workers will engage in hygienic behaviour and account for up to 30% of the phenotypic variability in hygienic behaviour in our population. Furthermore, we identify two loci that influence the likelihood that a worker will perform uncapping behaviour only, and one locus that influences removal behaviour. We report the first candidate genes associated with engaging in hygienic behaviour, including four genes involved in olfaction, learning and social behaviour, and one gene involved in circadian locomotion. These candidates will allow molecular characterization of this distinctive behavioural mode of disease resistance, as well as providing the opportunity for marker-assisted selection for this commercially significant trait.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20298472

.

 

[Finman]

.
What makes new mite females infertile


There is a bee population on Gotland Isle (Sweden), which stays alive under natural mite pressure but it does not show extra hygienic behaviour like other mite tolerant strains.

It was found out that sterile daughter of mites is the key. . But how?

http://www.apimondia.com/congresses...t the individual level - ROSENKRANZ Peter.pdf

 

[TryingToLetThemBee]

a) avirulence ... the varroa slow down their breeding to allow their host and themselves to survive.
r

Yes I was simplifying to avoid repetition. I have, earlier in this thread, agreed that varroa evolution will probably be the dominant mechanism. But the basic point stands, even if it should have been framed in co-evolutionary terms.

 

[user 6228]

There are quite much research about tolerancy againts varroa. NO research mention that "humidity" thing, except that one reaseach in tropic.

The basic is Natural Hygienic Behaviour, where 6 genes are known to affect.

Abstract 2010

Honeybee hygienic behaviour provides colonies with protection from many pathogens and is an important model system of the genetics of a complex behaviour. It is a textbook example of complex behaviour under simple genetic control:

hygienic behaviour consists of two components
-uncapping a diseased brood cell,
- followed by removal of the contents-
-each of which are thought to be modulated independently by a few loci of medium to large effect.

A worker's genetic propensity to engage in hygienic tasks affects the intensity of the stimulus required before she initiates the behaviour. Genetic diversity within colonies leads to task specialization among workers, with a minority of workers performing the majority of nest-cleaning tasks. We identify three quantitative trait loci that influence the likelihood that workers will engage in hygienic behaviour and account for up to 30% of the phenotypic variability in hygienic behaviour in our population. Furthermore, we identify two loci that influence the likelihood that a worker will perform uncapping behaviour only, and one locus that influences removal behaviour. We report the first candidate genes associated with engaging in hygienic behaviour, including four genes involved in olfaction, learning and social behaviour, and one gene involved in circadian locomotion. These candidates will allow molecular characterization of this distinctive behavioural mode of disease resistance, as well as providing the opportunity for marker-assisted selection for this commercially significant trait.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20298472

.

Again a logical fallacy, that a lack of citations proves falsehood.

Another logical fallacy - the original paper said it might explain lower varroa in the tropics so therefore you assert it cant applied to temperate climates.

humidity as measured in the research is a characteristic of the nest not the environment outside the nest. the two are only close if the nest has high thermal conductance and high porosity

it is easy to have high humidity in nests in northern climes, just think of all the paranoia about damp.

 

[TryingToLetThemBee]

Please try to use some reasoned logic rather than rhetorical devices.

But the basic point is unanswerable, although I'm not sure about the assumptions or the maths. The number of colonies can tolerate losses at the levels seen since 1992 and still expand logarithmically; all the two of you are arguing about is how fast.

 

[Finman]

.
When US Russian bee was started to breed, origin was from Primorsky region of Eastern Russia.

It was found that busy swarming style was one factor which kep the colonies alive.

Later it was found too, that when mite load is high in the hive, bees pull almost all brood away from combs. This do not save the colony but it keeps it alive longer. Loss of foragers are big and that is why production of honey is lower that mite tolerant Carniola bees (Germany).

After all, US Russian Bees have many strange behaviours. like that it keeps queen cells in its hive all the time.

Russian bees have breeded now 20 years....and it has not resolved the problem...
http://sweetmountainfarm.com/doorcounty/index.php/russian-bees/russian-bee-history

.

 

[Finman]

.

Remember, Varroa has its succesfull evolution too. Its life cycle is fast and generations are countless during one year.


Varroa did this in 30 years

Birth Place of Varroa destructor. Noticed first about 100 years ago

 

[Hivemaker.]

.


Varroa did this in 30 years

Birth Place of Varroa destructor about 100 years ago

[mg]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6b/Primorsky_in_Russia.svg/800px-Primorsky_in_Russia.svg.png[/img]

With a lot of help from man.

 

[user 6228]

But the basic point is unanswerable, although I'm not sure about the assumptions or the maths. The number of colonies can tolerate losses at the levels seen since 1992 and still expand logarithmically; all the two of you are arguing about is how fast.

Im not arguing about how fast, I'm saying the point is totally spurious whose sole purpose is to divert. it is a rhetorical device.

The writer has a biological sciences background and knows that exponential growth is impossible unless there is infinite habitats, infinite food, zero losses from all other causes i.e. other diseases, weather , zero swarm capture , zero contamination from other strains and infinite speed of type spreading.

 

[drstitson]

"as we might be doing more harm than good?"

we'll that's the issue - it is our choice of (relatively) crowded apiaries that encourages horizontal transmission which allows for high virulence (as killing colony X doesn't matter as colony Y next door will do for next few generations. Vertical transmission (in distantly spaced feral colonies) selects for reduced virulence (you don't want to kill your only local host). Note: seeley found that feral colonies had surprisingly high % of drone brood - which one would imagine would be a recipe for disaster in varroa terms.