Scott Johnson, director of the Low Technology Institute, will be speaking to the Dane County Beekeepers’ Association (locally known as Madbees) about the Varroa destructor mite. This tick-like creature has become honey bees’ top pest over the last few decades. As we’re learning, colony collapse disorder seems to be caused by a variety of factors that weaken the hive — Varroa mites are a big contributor.
The presentation will be held at the Fitchburg Public Library on November 7th, 2017 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Meetings are open to the public. The presentation will be turned into a podcast added to our Occasional Lectures series.
Managed, feral and wild populations of European honey bee subspecies, Apis mellifera, are currently facing severe colony losses globally. There is consensus that the ectoparasitic mite Varroa destructor, that switched hosts from the Eastern honey bee Apis cerana to the Western honey bee A. mellifera, is a key factor driving these losses. For >20 years, breeding efforts have not produced European honey bee colonies that can survive infestations without the need for mite control. However, at least three populations of European honey bees have developed this ability by means of natural selection and have been surviving for >10 years without mite treatments. Reduced mite reproductive success has been suggested as a key factor explaining this natural survival. Here, we report a managed A. mellifera population in Norway, that has been naturally surviving consistent V. destructor infestations for >17 years.
It was proven back in 2011 that honey bees will make more pessimistic decisions after being shaken in a way that simulates an attack by varroa destructor mites. The bees were trained to associate a reward of sugar-water with a particular odor and to associate foul-tasting punishment water with another odor—that of formic acid, a common treatment against varroa mites. When a third stimulus created by mixing the two odors was presented, the experimenters found that the aggravated bees were more likely to expect the bad odor. Sure enough, they kept their tongues in their mouths when they smelled the third odor. All the bees that weren’t shaken looked forward to sucking down a bit of sugar-water.
Derrick Maness started beekeeping 23 years ago when he was only 14 after being inspired by his middle school science teacher. He began working at Western Colorado Honey with Paul Limbach at a young age and now owns Colorado Mountain Honey, which is located in Silt next to the Pauline S. Schneegas Wildlife Foundation.
Although the farm and facility is located in Silt, the hives are spread throughout the Western Slope. Limbach, Maness and their teams take care of close to 3,000 hives, which equates to roughly 200 million bees raised locally.
Bogansky described unhealthy hives as “varroa bombs,” because of their capability of spreading the mites.
They are considered an unpleasant outcome of increased attention paid to honeybee population loss — people with good intentions may think they can support honeybees by keeping hives as a hobby, but if those hives are poorly tended they could turn into varroa bombs.
“There is an emerging consensus that electronic beehive monitoring is the way to go, so it can help extract critical data from the hive without disturbing the hive,” Kulyukin said, sitting next to one of his four hives.
That winter, Kulyukin put the BeePi into two of his overwintering hives on private property in Cache Valley to fine-tune the device and test its systems. Since the initial testing, Kulyukin has collected hundreds of gigabytes of information as he has improved the design.
Evolutionary ecologist Leslie Saul-Gershenz goes places where many have been but few have ever really seen.
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We remember writing about her work in April of 2013 when she addressed the Nor Cal Entomology Society (now folded) about her research on how blister beetle nest parasites cooperate to mimic the sex pheromone of a digger bee. She had just returned from the Mojave National Preserve, tracking the solitary bee Habropoda pallida and its nest parasite, a blister beetle, Meloe franciscanus.
One of the best things about working in research is that it never fails to surprise – for good or for bad. And occasionally, it is not until much later that the surprise comes. In this case, the “surprise” arrived in the form of another Varroa-vectored, RNA virus, Varroa Destructor Virus-1, or VDV1.
[GLP Editor’s note: Karen Rennich is the Project Manager for Bee Informed Partnership and APHIS National Survey, working out of University of Maryland’s Entomology Department. Among other things, they are studying the Varroa destructor mite, which a consensus of entomologists believe carries viruses that are the primary threat to bee health, rather than pesticides. This study provides further documentation of the dramatic spread of a particularly lethal form of a virus carried by the mite.]
