[HN Gopher] Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S....
___________________________________________________________________
Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-
off
Author : pseudolus
Score : 160 points
Date : 2025-07-01 10:35 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| sylvainkalache wrote:
| I live in Florida. Both my neighbor and I lost our hive q few
| weeks apart. It happened very quickly and what the article
| mentioned is most likely what they got. We knew about the sharp
| die-off across the U.S. so decided to hold off bee keeping until
| it is figured out.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there is a survey slideshow and a raw research paper linked in
| that article. these colony numbers are beyond awful.
| mitchbob wrote:
| https://archive.ph/tGxRx
| aspenmayer wrote:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706v1 (
| https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706 )
|
| > 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
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and
| January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the
| United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the
| largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off
| the previous winter.
|
| Christ, do we even have any bees left at this point?
| milliams wrote:
| It would need to be put in the context of what a normal annual
| die-off is. I expect it's not 0%, and perhaps it's normal for
| keepers to need to re-establish some fraction of their hives
| each year.
|
| Of course, 50-60% sounds alarmingly high, but I don't know
| enough to be sure.
|
| Actually, I just followed the link in the article (good job
| detailing their sources!) and it looks like 40% is pretty
| typical, but with large error bars. 62% is definitely high, but
| not as earth shattering as it first appears.
| RangerScience wrote:
| AFAIK, this is only _commercial_ bees, which have a pile of
| stressors (such as being shipped places frequently). Non-
| commercial bees are doing "better" (I remember hearing that
| they're doing fine, but poking around now that doesn't seem to
| be the case).
|
| The other issue is crop pollination, which AFAIK has heavy
| reliance on commercial bees.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Most staples wind pollinate (corn, wheat, etc). Bees are
| needed for a lot of fruit and nut production though.
| tptacek wrote:
| To a first approximation ~all honeybees in North America are
| commercial honeybees; the way it was put on EconTalk a couple
| years back is, "if you see a honeybee in your yard, somebody
| owns it."
| humblebeekeeper wrote:
| In the US, honeybees aren't native, and the bees we really need
| to protect are the native bees.
|
| That said, most beekeepers expect to lose 30-50% of their hives
| every year. But most honeybee hives can be split into two hives
| every year. So if you can double (or even potentially triple,
| quadruple) each hive every year, a loss of 50% isn't
| catastrophic.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| you mean after the modern practice of truck shipping hives
| was commercially accepted, then "most beekeepers" expect that
| ??
| humblebeekeeper wrote:
| Prior to the langstroth hive, European beekeepers destroyed
| the hive entirely to harvest the honey. Mites and disease
| were less prevalent and insects were FAR less stressed by
| the environment.
|
| The Langstroth hive was invented in the 1850s, and the
| first migratory commercial hives started in the US 50 years
| later.
|
| In the 1940s we saw a steady decline in hives, but the
| hives _really_ started seeing massive die offs in the
| 2000s.
|
| So no, the timelines are not really due to shipping
| commercial hives. There's other, stronger factors at play.
| taeric wrote:
| Framing of this fact is one you need to be careful with.
| Consider that your skin is replaced every 28 days. Stated
| differently, you completely lose all of your skin every month
| or so. Of course, it is replaced as rapidly, but if you only
| discuss the die off...
|
| That is, you almost certainly need to know a lot more facts
| about bees before knowing the die off rate is useful.
| westurner wrote:
| How to plant a pollinator garden?
|
| How to counter parasitic mites? Aren't there new LLM applications
| for chemicals discovery?
|
| > _According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this
| month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee
| viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one
| of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz,
| the only viable mite-specific pesticide -- or miticide -- of its
| kind left in humans' arsenal_
|
| "Viruses and vectors tied to honey bee colony losses" (2025)
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706v1....
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > How to counter parasitic mites? Aren't there new LLM
| applications for chemicals discovery?
|
| hard to imagine that additional hubris will solve problems
| created by hubris
| westurner wrote:
| "Chemical knowledge and reasoning of large language models
| vs. chemist expertise" (2025)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44275471
| westurner wrote:
| From (2025)
| https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2025/04/11/fda-animals-
| do... :
|
| > _[FDA] will encourage researchers to use computer
| modeling and artificial intelligence to predict how a drug
| will perform, as well as organs-on-a-chip, which are
| miniaturized devices that mimic organs and tissues. And to
| determine effectiveness, the FDA will begin using existing,
| real-world safety data from other countries where a drug
| has already been studied in humans._
|
| Also from 2025: "FDA to Use A.I. In Drug Approvals to
| 'Radically Increase Efficiency'"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44252183
|
| (Edit)
|
| From FDA > "Artificial Intelligence for Drug Development"
| https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-
| res... :
|
| > _FDA published a draft guidance in 2025 titled,
| "Considerations for the Use of Artificial Intelligence to
| Support Regulatory Decision Making for Drug and Biological
| Products."_
| franktankbank wrote:
| Native pollinators don't give a shit about mites. Don't spray
| herbicide and nature will do the rest.
| westurner wrote:
| What in nature eats the mites that are killing the bees?
| franktankbank wrote:
| Nothing needs to eat them, they just need to be manageable
| for the bee pops. The way that native colonies work, it
| just doesn't matter. The colonies size is essentially never
| greater than a few and often don't form colonies at all, so
| mites don't have really any good transmission vector.
| oezi wrote:
| There are some technological ideas to help bees be healthier such
| as special bee hives which have more natural topology and help
| the bees spend less energy on cooling/heating the hive. Example
| for a cylindrical hive: https://www.hiive.eu/en/
| tantalor wrote:
| We could install HVAC in each hive.
|
| Can heat pumps be scaled down to that size?
| colanderman wrote:
| Peltier heat pumps, though less efficient than other types,
| can be made very small and have no moving parts.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > though less efficient than other types
|
| IIRC they are _massively_ less efficient. Relevant
| Technology Connections video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnMRePtHMZY
| newsclues wrote:
| there are simple, no power, designs that have existed for a
| long time that would be a better way to go.
|
| kiss
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I'm thinking something like a wind-powered rotating attic
| fan.
| newsclues wrote:
| No power and no moving parts are good design goals.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher
|
| Perforated Double Skinned Exterior
|
| Lots of cool tech from the past
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Sometimes the old ways are best. To paraphrase Jerry
| Seinfeld, sometimes the road less traveled is less
| traveled for a reason, or they'd just call it _the way_.
|
| 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?
| cogman10 wrote:
| You don't typically have just 1 hive. It's usually a group of
| them.
|
| 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.
| waffletower wrote:
| There may be passive geothermal heat pump architectures that
| would be a good fit. Surprised that you can still learn about
| geothermal heat pumps from the U.S. government:
| https://www.energy.gov/eere/geothermal/geothermal-heat-pumps
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Commercial hives need to be portable. Geothermal isn't
| that.
| drtgh wrote:
| I searched about this and found a German beekeeper with such
| hives,
|
| 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).
| serguzest wrote:
| There's a truth we're rarely taught in school and I find it
| deeply poetic: The vivid colors we see in flowers, even those
| beyond our vision in the ultraviolet, and the delicate fragrances
| that drift on the breeze they're not for us.
|
| They are nature's love songs, composed to seduce insects. All
| this beauty is a grand performance, meant to charm bugs into
| becoming messengers of life, carrying pollen from bloom to bloom.
|
| Bees, though precious, are just one part of this ancient dance.
| Moths, beetles, butterflies, each plays a role in this quiet
| symphony of survival.
|
| And yet, this balance is being disrupted. Greedy and short-
| sighted actions are damaging ecosystems that are far more complex
| than we understand.
|
| But here's the humbling part: Nature will endure. She always has.
| She'll shake us off like dust, heal in silence, and bloom again
| with or without witnesses.
| esafak wrote:
| So we're waiting for bees to evolve resistance to these mites?
| serguzest wrote:
| bu yazdiklarimdan onu mu anladin aq otistigi. Hepimizi
| geberip gidecegiz doga devam edecek
| svota wrote:
| No, we're waiting for humans to die off so that bees don't
| live in these conditions. Eventually something will start to
| eat those mites, or the commercial honeybee will go extinct.
| One way or another, this problem won't exist.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The standard practice for commercial crops is to bring in
| commercial hives of bees for pollination season that are shipped
| together via truck from crop to crop and region to region.
|
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Doesn't even seem like this is something that couldn't or
| shouldn't be region locked.
|
| These companies are likely aren't saving more than a few
| percentage by centralizing and distributing.
| Spivak wrote:
| Unless we change our farming practices there isn't much else
| you can do. You have acres and acres of land that are
| completely dead (as far as pollinators are concerned) for
| almost all of the year and then suddenly every plant blooms all
| at once and then goes away.
| humblebeekeeper wrote:
| This is what so few people realize -- farming, as it's
| practiced in the US, is basically mining.
|
| 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.
| pstuart wrote:
| And the only way for that change to happen is to bake in
| monetary incentives that help drive it, whilst doing so in
| a political climate that is just fine with the way things
| are.
| humblebeekeeper wrote:
| I disagree. We can also continue to engage in
| revolutionary thought and practice locally. We can decide
| that collective and community health and wellbeing are
| more important than individual success. It's a more
| _difficult_ road, but the capitalist mode of "just tweak
| the financial curves" is not the _only_ way we can
| approach this problem. Just the most well supported
| today.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| I like to bring this up in regards to livestock. "If we
| shouldn't eat chickens, then why are they food shaped?"
| Well, they are food shaped! Most of the animals we eat are
| designed to be eaten, born and bred over thousands of years
| to achieve that goal. A chicken is a most unnatural animal.
| No other bird has any reason to lay 300 eggs per year.
|
| Livestock is as GMO as they come, just on a longer scale.
| sophacles wrote:
| What a strange response to "monocropping is bad, we
| should probably follow the science and farm in a way that
| keeps pollinators around and soil healthy". They didn't
| say anything about not having chickens or cows.... in
| fact most regenerative farming practices need chickens
| and cows (and pigs and goats) to make the soil healthier
| and keep pollinators healthy.
| datameta wrote:
| This reads as a kneejerk reaction to the mention of GMO
| as if the person you responded to has an agenda. I think
| their point is that we need to be aware of what is
| natural (aka tested to equilibrium over huge periods of
| time) and what is artificial (propped up by human
| practices on the relatively short timescale of centuries
| and millenia).
|
| 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.
| humblebeekeeper wrote:
| FWIW, I do object to the _industrial_ raising of animals
| for food as well.
|
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| The comment you responded to didn't say anything about
| GMO
| datameta wrote:
| The comment GP responded to was talking about how we have
| modified the environments of farms - talking about GMO
| livestock is a stone's toss away.
| humblebeekeeper wrote:
| FWIW, I am not opposed to GMOs broadly. But I _am_
| opposed to GMOs for the purpose of enabling more
| industrialization in agriculture. I don 't see, e.g., red
| grapefruits as bad, even though they used an early form
| of genetic engineering (seeds were exposed to radiation
| in hopes of creating random mutations.)
| datameta wrote:
| I think I see your viewpoint and agree with it. It isn't
| a matter of "do we modify or not" but rather "how, when,
| and for what purpose? who benefits? does this damage the
| land or species lineage? etc"
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Exactly. Honeybees are a monoculture bandaid slapped on top
| of the monoculture farming problem, and ultimately suffer
| the same fate.
|
| 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).
| panarchy wrote:
| I actually think this is where smaller more "organic" type
| robots and AI will play a role. We can do more restorative
| and mixed farming and then have a legion of robots doing
| all the picking. The way agricultural automation is
| currently with equidistant rows all with the same type of
| plant because it's basically impossible to make a machine
| that can take apples off a tree and pick blueberries but
| you can make a very optimized machine that can do either.
| Kind of like 10,000 cheap drones or 1 fighter jet.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| From what I've read, the hives that are seeing these severe
| die offs are the commercial hives that are being shipped
| around.
|
| 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.
| timr wrote:
| Untended wild hives are probably also more genetically
| diverse, and therefore more robust to parasites and
| viruses.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| To be clear, the hives that are systematically _reporting_
| these severe die-offs are largely commercial hives.
|
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| Try this: go find a place that sells honeybee nucs (a
| starter hive). Then go to Archive.org and compare the
| prices 10 years ago. I took the first "storefront" hit on
| Google, and found archived pages back to 2016 --- in
| 2016, a queen was $40; today, $42.
|
| If it's a collapse it seems like a slow collapse.
| humblebeekeeper wrote:
| This has been the practice for more than a century. We saw the
| steepest declines post 2000s. While it almost certainly isn't
| helping, it's not the one root cause.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The practice wouldn't be problematic until after the
| parasites you are shipping with the hives evolve pesticide
| resistance/immunity.
|
| As soon as that gene arises, spreading it across the country
| becomes a bad idea.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| hives not open whole year have no mites.
|
| 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.
| humblebeekeeper wrote:
| This is simply, objectively false.
| timr wrote:
| Varoa mites are incredibly hard to control. Back in undergrad I
| worked in a fruit fly lab, and we would periodically have
| outbreaks, despite being about the most isolated, sterile
| population of insects you can imagine.
|
| 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.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I doubt that there's any hope at all of controlling mites
|
| I'm more interested in no longer spreading the mite gene(s)
| for pesticide immunity across the country.
| timr wrote:
| Well that's easy: stop using miticide.
|
| The resistance genes are not spreading due to physical
| transport, they're spreading because of evolutionary
| selection.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I would say that the pesticide immunity genes arise
| because of evolutionary selection, but once they come
| into existance commercial beekeeping practices quickly
| spread those genes from hive to hive and across the
| country.
| timr wrote:
| You might be right that the physical distribution plays a
| role, but the partial selective pressure of insecticide
| is like a resistance-generating machine -- as anyone who
| has tried to kill cockroaches will tell you.
|
| Regardless, I think we both agree that the extremely
| unnatural pressures of industrial agriculture are a root
| cause here.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Certainly.
|
| 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.
| ne0flex wrote:
| There's a company called, Greenlight Biosciences, that's
| developing an RNA-based pesticide for Varroa Mites. Last I
| spoke with the CEO, he mentioned positive results from
| trials.
|
| https://www.greenlightbiosciences.com/in-the-pipeline-
| protec...
| timr wrote:
| That's cool, in a "better living through chemistry", 1950s
| man-in-a-white-labcoat sort of way. But when it comes to
| this stuff, I tend to be a bit like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic
| Park: they're so focused on whether they _could_ , that
| they never considered if they _should_.
|
| 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.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| > miticides (which are insecticides, btw Mites are not
| insects, so miticides are not necessarily insecticides, no?
| drtgh wrote:
| OffTopic: Something similar to fishing vessels,
|
| 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).
| ponector wrote:
| First time I hear someone is freezing fresh fish at home.
| Everyone I know tries to eat fresh never-frozen fish.
|
| I thought the main barier is to apply intense heat to the
| fish, not to freeze it.
| Thimothy wrote:
| In places where fish is eaten raw (or lightly pickled) you
| NEED to freeze it before preparing it. Anisakis is no joke.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisakis
| taeric wrote:
| The first time we tried to pan sear some fresh salmon was
| about the last time we ever tried fresh salmon. Holy crap
| that is an eye opener. Took a long time to get over that
| feeling of seeing the parasites and learning that that is
| basically expected in wild fish.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| In NZ if you do your own fishing you freeze guts and frames
| so you don't stink your rubbish bin and you drop it back to
| ocean on your next trip. Keeps chilly bin cold too.
| foundart wrote:
| TLDR: "According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this
| month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee
| viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one
| of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz,
| the only viable mite-specific pesticide--or miticide--of its kind
| left in humans' arsenal."
| Modified3019 wrote:
| I'm an agronomist and ~ten years ago attended an yearly
| industry meeting where there are various presentations that we
| sit in on and gain "credits" to maintain various state licenses
| used to legally recommend and/or apply fertilizers and
| pesticides.
|
| 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...
| spookie wrote:
| You don't need that stuff. Oxalic acid or formic acid does the
| job.
| arealaccount wrote:
| I love that they attach a big $ number to the alarm in hopes that
| it will resonate with the powers at be.
|
| > Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts
| say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the
| United States, generate between $20 billion and $30 billion in
| agricultural revenue
| lapetitejort wrote:
| The only large number that would make the general populace care
| would be $30 watermelons.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Anecdotally, it seems that the bee population has been increasing
| in the past few years - though still much lower than 20 years
| ago.
| Finnucane wrote:
| "The USDA and university labs are key components."
|
| Well, then, we're fucked.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Can drones help?
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Not really. Once they mate and the queen is all set to produce
| new workers, the drones are expendable.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've let my yard grow wild, and there are a lot of flowers and a
| constant hum of bumblebees in the summer.
| mrweasel wrote:
| As a Danish beekeeper: Who the hell uses a pesticide in their
| beehives?
|
| 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.
| spookie wrote:
| You can use formic acid too
| ted_dunning wrote:
| What are the bees in your hive doing when you are using this
| oxalic acid?
|
| 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)
| mrweasel wrote:
| You put the acid in the hive, in an evaporator. The air in
| the hive then becomes acidic enough to burn through the
| exoskeleton of the mites. Technically it also damages the
| exoskeleton of the bees, but that's thick enough that the bee
| doesn't notice. You normally do this over a period of 14 days
| in late summer, early autumn. As the other commenter points
| out formic acid is also an option.
|
| 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.
| drtgh wrote:
| > 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.
| rob_c wrote:
| A branch of US farming again reaping the rewards of non selective
| non food-chain-toxic (not a phrase but for simplicity sake)
| chemical use.
|
| 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
| paul_h wrote:
| From a few weeks ago - https://civileats.com/2025/06/11/honey-
| bees-learn-to-fight-d....
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