I grew up on a farm on which the apiary and all connected with it was a major part of the farm's output. Honey, beeswax, nukes (a queen and 10K or so worker bees as a starter colony, sold to other apiaries in the spring if they'd had too many winter losses), fertilizing services (drop a couple colonies off at a berry farm after dark, pick the colonies up two weeks later, profit!) and other products.
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.
achierius 4 minutes ago [-]
> 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
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!
ct0 2 hours ago [-]
There is recent article from scientific beekeeper that goes into detail about these using their own venom as a cleaning agent.
andai 1 hours ago [-]
Fascinating, thanks. What does winterization involve? I looked it up online but there's a whole bunch of different information.
Also how cold does it get?
tomaytotomato 8 hours ago [-]
Check out Paul Stamets' research using Mycelium to give honeybees an immuneboost.
TIL that the Star Trek Stamets character is based on a real world Paul Stamets working on actual Mycelium. Wow
temp0826 2 hours ago [-]
TIL that there is a character based off him in Star Trek??
dreamcompiler 2 hours ago [-]
And Anthony Rapp (the actor who plays him) went through some awful stuff that made him famous for another reason and he seems to have come out stronger. Good for him.
As for the whole mycelium plot in Discovery, I found it so ridiculous that I refuse to consider that show canon.
veonik 33 minutes ago [-]
There’s far worse problems with Discovery ;) but really, much of Trek is ridiculous: “we went really fast around a sun and traveled back in time to _exactly_ when we need to be.” Convenient!
ghostbrainalpha 28 minutes ago [-]
I thought he lost the case?
homeonthemtn 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
colordrops 4 hours ago [-]
Why should I do anything but take your anonymous comment with a huge grain of salt. Is the irony completely lost here?
temp0826 2 hours ago [-]
He uses his rep to hawk overpriced supplements
homeonthemtn 2 hours ago [-]
It's pretty easy to check his Wikipedia and see for your self what his academic background is. You can also read research done specifically by him, if you can find it, and you can read his books and judge for yourself if what he is selling is suspiciously without evidence. Or go to his website hocking "host defense" mushroom capsules.
Compared to an actual mycologist like Gary Lincoff (rip), I think you'll see the contrast to be sharp.
Or don't. No skin off my back.
schainks 9 hours ago [-]
Honeybees are not native to North America.
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.
looping__lui 9 hours ago [-]
I suppose honey bees are not native in North America pretty much the same way as the human species?
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.
dqv 2 hours ago [-]
> I suppose honey bees are not native in North America pretty much the same way as the human species?
No? Well not in a way that wouldn't be stretching an owl over a globe. But Carolina Jessamine is toxic to honeybees and not natives (or at least there exist native bees who have adapted to not slurp on it if it is toxic to them). That doesn't stop people from spreading the lie that Carolina Jessamine "hurts bees". It hurts some species of bees. To transfer this concept to the human population, you'd have to start arguing that there are different species of humans or, again, construct a stretching-an-owl-over-a-globe argument.
And people can't mention every caveat in every discussion, sorry. You've really just constructed a strawman.
In a 40-minute discussion with someone like Doug Tallamy, both the issue of invasive honeybees and pesticides will come up. The venn diagram of people who care about both things is very close to a circle.
Also, as to your edit - that honeybees rely on humans doesn't change their impact on native bee populations, which is they outcompete native bees.
There's nothing weird about correcting the popular ignorant assumption that the only pollinator that matters is honeybees.
anjel 2 hours ago [-]
Robotic polinators ftw.
ghssds 45 minutes ago [-]
I saw that Black Mirror episode.
mastermage 8 hours ago [-]
An idea that sprang to mind and please point me out at which points its unrealistic and why because I am talking completely out of my ass here. If we want to reduce mono culture but we still need to somehow figure out how to provide humanity. Could large scale vertical farms, in Green Houses reduce the footprint of monocultures? By being more productive year round? Or is that just technolgist delusions of mine?
j4k0bfr 8 hours ago [-]
The thing that always baffles me with vertical farming is sunlight. Assuming most crops are pretty good at turning full spectrum sunlight into useful stuff, why shrink your solar energy per crop?
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.
ssl-3 7 hours ago [-]
I think it's hard to generalize whether vertical farms are good or bad; efficient or inefficient. It seems that whether it works or not relies very heavily on the locality.
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.
devsda 4 hours ago [-]
Just thinking like if something doesn't grow in winter, is it because of lack of plant's adaptation or is it because their primary vector for seed dispersal hasn't adapted to survive in that weather or may be because it is not safe to consume in that season.
Or simply put, can wild animals eat tomatoes safely(on evolutionary timescale) in winter if they don't normally grow in winter.
b112 8 hours ago [-]
This only makes sense in certain circumstances I think. For example, shipping tomatoes from 5000km away when it's winter in Canada.
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.
anjel 2 hours ago [-]
Canadian hydroelectric is the catalyst that makes winter hothouse produce cost competitive. Wealthy us elec producers have no incentive to match Canada's low cost of production. Indeed their incentives are rather contrary.
lebuffon 40 minutes ago [-]
In southern Ontario where there are many ( the most?) greenhouses electricity is primarily produced by Nuclear (50..55%) Hydro power is about 24 ..38% of the total.
I think the bigger difference is the Canadian attitude about the "commons" nature of electricity and so profiting excessively on power is frowned upon.
forlorn_mammoth 6 hours ago [-]
I appreciate you being upfront about the depth of your knowledge.
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.
bell-cot 6 hours ago [-]
Over the years, many firms have poured many $millions into vertical farms.
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.
m4x 5 hours ago [-]
> you're trying to compete with millions of square miles of naturally sun-lit dirt
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.
bell-cot 4 hours ago [-]
> ... when you don't have access to ...
These days, "don't have access" is a micro-market. Everywhere else, indoor growing has to compete with the cost & delay of importing. Last I heard, even Antarctic bases are only growing a few fresh veggies - 99% of their food is imported. (Well, plant-based food. They might do a fair bit of fishing.)
> CEA has been used ...
My comment was replying to magemaster's "large scale vertical farms ... just technologist delusions".* Vs. greenhouses - which can be little more than plastic sheeting over light wooden framing over sunlit dirt - yes, those have far saner economics. Mushrooms - which can be grown in dark caves without dirt using prehistoric technology - are also a very different thing.
*To quote Wikipedia - "The modern concept of vertical farming was proposed in 1999 by Dickson Despommier, professor of Public and Environmental Health at Columbia University.[2] Despommier and his students came up with a design of a skyscraper farm that could feed 50,000 people."
looping__lui 8 hours ago [-]
I’m just saying: stop hating bees with made up arguments
gadders 9 hours ago [-]
>>Honeybees are not native to North America.
Neither are horses.
I guess the issue is you don't get honey with the native bees.
lebuffon 36 minutes ago [-]
There were native horses, in fact the genus began in N. America and migrated out.
Remains have been found in permafrost in Northern Canada.
They went extinct about 12,700 years ago, sometime after humans arrived.
nerbert 8 hours ago [-]
Neither with horses
gadders 7 hours ago [-]
Good point. We need to genetically modify horses that can pollinate plants and create honey.
galangalalgol 6 hours ago [-]
GMO hyper competitive feral cat colonies that ignore birds and pollinate gmo soybeans whilst collecting for their kitten hives. Each claw is of course a stinger. What could go wrong.
bregma 6 hours ago [-]
"Ohh, soo cute! Here little kitty! OMG... RUN!!!"
colechristensen 9 hours ago [-]
A quite similar horse species went extinct in North America ~10,000 years ago likely due to humans.
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.
MostlyStable 2 hours ago [-]
I've always had a soft spot for the plan of repopulating the Great Plains with modern versions of all the extinct megafauna. We used to have camels and cheetahs and lions and more. We could import half of the African large mammals and they would have had near species analogs in the relatively recent past, geologically speaking.
bregma 6 hours ago [-]
The catch is that native North American pollinators are adapted to native North American flowers and have a great deal of difficulty pollinating introduced species that are native to Eurasia. Given the vast majority of commercial crops are not native plant species, the only way to mass pollinate them is to use non-native pollinators.
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.
dqv 1 hours ago [-]
That's not true. We have a lot of generalist bees (and other pollinators too! bees aren't the only ones that pollinate!) that can pollinate the Eurasian crops. This is also true for any other crop on any other continent. And I am dubious as to your claim about major crops. Soybeans, for example, are self-pollinating, so it would seem any generalist bee can pollinate soybean crops for better yields.
This is an issue of biodiversity. If we rely on a mono-species for pollination and that mono-species goes extinct or its population plummets, then our crop yields are down 20% until we can build up other bee populations.
This is about giving back to Nature so that She may continue to cradle us. And She does tend to punish us for "optimizing" toward one specific species.
We do enough already taking crops from one part of the world and putting them elsewhere. In exchange for that, we really ought to be trying to support the native wildlife as much as possible. The Europeans can have their honey, and I will have my maple syrup. On occasion, of course, so as not to upset Nature.
grayhatter 3 hours ago [-]
Did you just ask if we could use AI to create new/better honey bees?
xgulfie 3 hours ago [-]
Grok, pollinate the flowers
halflife 9 hours ago [-]
If they are not native, how did plant propagate seeds? Flies? Wasps? Butterflies?
Jedd 8 hours ago [-]
Amusingly, propagate has a horticultural, and non-horticultural meaning, and it's not obvious which one you're using there, because the bee's role is long over by the time the seed is ready to go out into the world.
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.
halflife 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the detailed comment! I always heard that bees pollinate the vast majority of plants, so in the parent comment, I assumed incorrectly that the meaning was for bees in general being non native.
Jedd 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, there's a claim I've seen about 'every third mouthful of food' that humans eat needs honeybees, and that may well be true.
I'm in Australia, and we only got Varroa in 2022, and it was suppressed for about a year before a regrettable 'oh well' attitude overwhelmed us. The last couple of years has seen a breathtaking impact.
Anecdata - one of my five hives is still struggling on.
Australia's experience since 2022 had (I thought) laid to rest a lot of the 'It's not varroa that's the problem' claims from armchair analysts.
But yes, per my earlier point, lots of our tree crops require honeybees to be shipped in - just because of broadacre / monoculture style farming. Well, along with honey production being its own industry - so they need to follow the nectar, and change up the flavours a bit, but also some trees just don't produce useful amounts of nectar but absolutely require a lot of pollinators for a few weeks only (almonds / peaches I think fit this category).
EdwardDiego 9 hours ago [-]
Native bees. Apis mellifera are introduced bees across most of the world.
But yes, there are other pollinators like butterflies, moths, flies, birds, etc.
halflife 4 hours ago [-]
Makes sense, thanks!
NoMoreNicksLeft 9 hours ago [-]
You could pick up a catalog from any of these places and find half a dozen different species of bees to cultivate for pollination. Blue mason bees come to mind. Anything that's even slightly domesticatable is being pursued. Some of these bees are loners too, perfect for the hipster crowd.
roboben 11 hours ago [-]
The hard truth these days is that the work of bee keeping is like 80% keeping the mites in check. Plus all current treatments render the honey inedible so you can only do it at the end of the season.
agilob 10 hours ago [-]
To add, varroa quickly gains immunity to the pharmaceutical treatment we have, so the same medication cannot be used 2 years in a row. Most popular treatment from late 90s that used to kill 99% of varroa is now completely ineffective.
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.
CommonGuy 3 hours ago [-]
Acid (oxalic acid, formic acid) treatments can be used multiple times in a row, but are harder on the bees
> Varroa sensitive hygiene (VSH) is a behavioral trait of honey bees (Apis mellifera) in which bees detect and remove bee pupae that are infested by the parasitic mite Varroa destructor. VSH activity results in significant resistance to the mites.
It sounds like you need to buy better gene stock in your area. USDA started publishing about this finding in 1997, almost 30 years ago.
CommonGuy 3 hours ago [-]
I have bees myself. Beekeepers and scientists all over the world are trying to breed better bees with improved VSH. While it may work in a laboratory, it does not seem to work consistently in practice. You cannot just buy a "VSH colony/queen" and no longer treat Varroa mites. Even with careful breeding, the VSH behavior often vanishes (or is greatly reduced) after 1-2 generations.
Of course having only colonies with a strong VSH would be the end goal so we no longer need to treat our bees. But until then, better treatments are needed.
throwaway2037 2 hours ago [-]
> Even with careful breeding, the VSH behavior often vanishes (or is greatly reduced) after 1-2 generations.
This is very interesting. I guess it well explains why these parasites are still a major issue.
lavela 3 hours ago [-]
As far as I know VSH is suppressed when you take away the honey. Taking away the honey puts the colony in constant food stress, which suppresses reproductive work.
mrweasel 7 hours ago [-]
Depending on location acid treatments can only be done after the honey harvest anyway, due to temperatures, so it's a minor issue.
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.
moebrowne 8 hours ago [-]
> Plus all current treatments render the honey inedible
Formic acid is one of the few treatments which is acceptable to use while honey is present.
brikym 8 hours ago [-]
Last I checked researchers were trying to evolve bees to be mite resistant. Is this something you've come across?
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
No. The mites are not what is killing the bees.
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.
The negative government prior is unusually attractive.
wizzwizz4 8 hours ago [-]
People who believe these types of things tend to get their information from the same places. Which podcasts do you listen to?
mrweasel 7 hours ago [-]
There is a valid point though. All types of insects are in decline, but the decline in bees is exclusively due to varroa? It's not unreasonable to assume that at least part of the decline in bees is due to the same conditions that results in less butterflies, beetles, dragonflies and so on.
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.
You can interpret what is being said charitably, as some true claims surrounded by nonsense. However, this says more about your model of the world than it does about the intentions or beliefs of the author. The phrasing and the argument structure suggests that to me this is the same belief cluster that supports COVID denialism and the idea that it is possible (perhaps desirable) to evolve immunity to arbitrary diseases via a "natural selection" let-the-weak-die eugenics.
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.)
chasil 6 hours ago [-]
Powdered sugar is the standard treatment for removing varroa mites that have emerged from capped cells.
"The peptides killed only the mites, while the bees survived."
What benefits do these new treatments offer? They certainly won't be cheaper.
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."
m4x 6 hours ago [-]
There currently isn't a effective treatment for varroa that doesn't also kill the hive. It is not a solved problem, and there is certainly room for more research in this space.
lavela 2 hours ago [-]
I am pretty sure I read that Bees would be capable of taking care of mites themselves, but taking away their honey puts them in constant food stress, thus suppressing that behavior, and compresses the colony thus increasing mite density. Can't find a proper study right now though.
bspammer 6 hours ago [-]
The article you linked lists a bunch of downsides to powdered sugar: it doesn’t kill the mites it just encourages the bees to brush them off, it has reduced effectiveness when it’s humid, it doesn’t work on mites that aren’t actively on a bees body, and it has to be applied regularly.
benbojangles 8 hours ago [-]
One day bees will evolve to produce spider venom
mrweasel 7 hours ago [-]
Asian bees are perfectly capable of removing and killing mites as is. So are some breed species of European honey bees. There have been found abandoned apiary in France where the bees have evolved to groom themselves and remove the mites.
The bees does need to evolve, but not to the point of producing venom. Mechanical mite removal works equally well.
speed_spread 6 hours ago [-]
I was rather thinking of bees developing the ability to shoot tiny lasers to cook the mites off like popcorn. Or maybe a static discharge from their wings rubbing together, like a natural taser.
roboben 3 hours ago [-]
mite popcorn with fresh honey sounds like a three star dish for $67
blooalien 11 hours ago [-]
Some potentially seriously good news there if it all pans out the way it sounds like it might. Fingers crossed for the bees!
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
This assumes the mites are what kills the bees. What is that asssumption is flawed?
EdwardDiego 9 hours ago [-]
Then all the scientists who study apiary are wrong and someone in the HN comments knows better than all of them.
Congratulations, I look forward to your Nobel prize.
somenameforme 1 hours ago [-]
There's a rather large body of evidence that herbicides, glyphosate in particular, are, at the minimum, contributing to the bee collapse. You can find a ton of studies on the topic - here [1] is a random one that overviews some of the literature, though it's already quite dated. It doesn't kill them, but wrecks their gut biome and causes numerous issues that contribute to colony collapse. It also significant but, as of yet, unclear negative effects on the human gut biome.
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.
This assumes no such thing at all (as I'm clearly no expert on bees), but it does assume that literal parasites cannot possibly be a good thing for the bees, and anything that genuinely helps the bees is a net plus for us all.
fodkodrasz 10 hours ago [-]
Nah, it cannot happen that Big Agro's poisons are to fault...
niksmather 10 hours ago [-]
Pesticides are bad for bees, but Varroa is too. Until Varroa arrived in Australia the bees there didn't suffer from colony collapse, despite high pesticide use.
EdwardDiego 9 hours ago [-]
Big Ag was already using those poisons before varroa, so if it was the cause, you would've seen it manifest before varroa.
somenameforme 8 hours ago [-]
It seems that varroa were first discovered in North America in 1987. [1] Glyphosate use at that time was around 4,500 metric tons. By 2014 we were up to 125,000 metric tons [2]. There was an exponential increase coming after 1996 when glyphosate resistant GMO crops became a thing. I don't have an opinion on this topic one way or the other, but there seem to be quite a lot of negative correlates since then, and this is just another one. Of course correlation doesn't mean causation, but you can't completely dismiss it.
we're going to need a lot of very tiny syringes and band-aids!
mjanx123 5 hours ago [-]
IIRC the Asian honey bee is more resilient to mites
CommonGuy 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, they remove the mites if they detect them. Asian honey bee colonies usually do not collapse from varroa mites.
But since European honey bees produce much more honey, the are the prefered species and used worldwide
tamimio 8 hours ago [-]
Kinda related, but in my house I don’t kill spiders, as long as they are in the corners they can live rent free while cleaning other bugs. Before, one time I went and killed all of them, in less than a week I started seeing sliverfish and similar bugs, I realized I messed up the natural order, so I just keep em now!
brikym 8 hours ago [-]
I leave the wolf spiders as they don't make webs.
taneq 6 hours ago [-]
In my old house we sprayed for spiders and ants, and a few weeks later there were cockroaches everywhere. I guess it was just a coincidence. >.>
aussieguy1234 10 hours ago [-]
So what's it going to do to the honey? Will we have spider venom laced honey?
hyperionultra 10 hours ago [-]
As article suggest - it is fully biodegradable. I suppose venom has some short half-life. And since peptide is isolated, not full chain toxin, it should be harmless to humans.
gadders 9 hours ago [-]
I'd imagine eating it has a different effect than having it directly enter the bloodstream as well.
taneq 6 hours ago [-]
Seems reasonable. After all, spicy ramen is probably also more dangerous when introduced directly to the bloodstream. ;)
karlkloss 9 hours ago [-]
A lot of people might become allergic to honey, and never know why.
mjmas 10 hours ago [-]
Probably, but not at any meaningful concentration.
Coneylake 8 hours ago [-]
Another terrible MCU spin-off
onesandofgrain 8 hours ago [-]
How did they screen for this venom?
throwaway2037 6 hours ago [-]
Too lazy to read an article that takes about one minute? Sheesh.
> “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.”
Luckyemmet 6 hours ago [-]
Genuinely thought this was a new marvel character lol
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
Still the honeybees keep on dying ...
Perhaps it is time to stop blaming the mites for the decline of the honeybees.
mrweasel 8 hours ago [-]
The Danish beekeeping association has a list of their top four reasons for declining bee populations (both honeybees and wild bees). None of them are mites. Multiple experiments and analysis of abandoned beehives show time and time again that the bees will develop coping mechanisms against varroa mites if we let them.
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.
Rendered at 16:21:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32194-8
As for the whole mycelium plot in Discovery, I found it so ridiculous that I refuse to consider that show canon.
Compared to an actual mycologist like Gary Lincoff (rip), I think you'll see the contrast to be sharp.
Or don't. No skin off my back.
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.
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.
No? Well not in a way that wouldn't be stretching an owl over a globe. But Carolina Jessamine is toxic to honeybees and not natives (or at least there exist native bees who have adapted to not slurp on it if it is toxic to them). That doesn't stop people from spreading the lie that Carolina Jessamine "hurts bees". It hurts some species of bees. To transfer this concept to the human population, you'd have to start arguing that there are different species of humans or, again, construct a stretching-an-owl-over-a-globe argument.
And people can't mention every caveat in every discussion, sorry. You've really just constructed a strawman.
In a 40-minute discussion with someone like Doug Tallamy, both the issue of invasive honeybees and pesticides will come up. The venn diagram of people who care about both things is very close to a circle.
Also, as to your edit - that honeybees rely on humans doesn't change their impact on native bee populations, which is they outcompete native bees.
There's nothing weird about correcting the popular ignorant assumption that the only pollinator that matters is honeybees.
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.
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.
Or simply put, can wild animals eat tomatoes safely(on evolutionary timescale) in winter if they don't normally grow in winter.
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.
I think the bigger difference is the Canadian attitude about the "commons" nature of electricity and so profiting excessively on power is frowned upon.
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.
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.
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.
These days, "don't have access" is a micro-market. Everywhere else, indoor growing has to compete with the cost & delay of importing. Last I heard, even Antarctic bases are only growing a few fresh veggies - 99% of their food is imported. (Well, plant-based food. They might do a fair bit of fishing.)
> CEA has been used ...
My comment was replying to magemaster's "large scale vertical farms ... just technologist delusions".* Vs. greenhouses - which can be little more than plastic sheeting over light wooden framing over sunlit dirt - yes, those have far saner economics. Mushrooms - which can be grown in dark caves without dirt using prehistoric technology - are also a very different thing.
*To quote Wikipedia - "The modern concept of vertical farming was proposed in 1999 by Dickson Despommier, professor of Public and Environmental Health at Columbia University.[2] Despommier and his students came up with a design of a skyscraper farm that could feed 50,000 people."
Neither are horses.
I guess the issue is you don't get honey with the native bees.
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.
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.
This is an issue of biodiversity. If we rely on a mono-species for pollination and that mono-species goes extinct or its population plummets, then our crop yields are down 20% until we can build up other bee populations.
This is about giving back to Nature so that She may continue to cradle us. And She does tend to punish us for "optimizing" toward one specific species.
We do enough already taking crops from one part of the world and putting them elsewhere. In exchange for that, we really ought to be trying to support the native wildlife as much as possible. The Europeans can have their honey, and I will have my maple syrup. On occasion, of course, so as not to upset Nature.
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.
I'm in Australia, and we only got Varroa in 2022, and it was suppressed for about a year before a regrettable 'oh well' attitude overwhelmed us. The last couple of years has seen a breathtaking impact.
Anecdata - one of my five hives is still struggling on.
Australia's experience since 2022 had (I thought) laid to rest a lot of the 'It's not varroa that's the problem' claims from armchair analysts.
But yes, per my earlier point, lots of our tree crops require honeybees to be shipped in - just because of broadacre / monoculture style farming. Well, along with honey production being its own industry - so they need to follow the nectar, and change up the flavours a bit, but also some trees just don't produce useful amounts of nectar but absolutely require a lot of pollinators for a few weeks only (almonds / peaches I think fit this category).
But yes, there are other pollinators like butterflies, moths, flies, birds, etc.
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.
Wiki page about the specific parasite that affects honey bees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_destructor
On that page there mention of "honey bee genetics" as a form of parasite control. It is called "Varroa sensitive hygiene". Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_sensitive_hygiene
It sounds like you need to buy better gene stock in your area. USDA started publishing about this finding in 1997, almost 30 years ago.Of course having only colonies with a strong VSH would be the end goal so we no longer need to treat our bees. But until then, better treatments are needed.
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.
Formic acid is one of the few treatments which is acceptable to use while honey is present.
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.
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).
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.)
"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."
The bees does need to evolve, but not to the point of producing venom. Mechanical mite removal works equally well.
Congratulations, I look forward to your Nobel prize.
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-...
https://academic.oup.com/jinsectscience/article/24/3/20/7683...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa
[2] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5044953/
But since European honey bees produce much more honey, the are the prefered species and used worldwide
Perhaps it is time to stop blaming the mites for the decline of the honeybees.
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.