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Honey bees increase social distancing when facing ectoparasite

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Re: Honey bees increase social distancing when facing ectoparasite

#5
The term "social distancing" was not a thing until the CoVid-19 pandemic, in my experience. It could be a sign of the times so the term is used because it is now popularly understood.

The Intro notes that "This hypothesis has been recently confirmed in the ant Lasius niger infected with the fungal pathogen Metarhizium brunneum, which induced behavioral changes ..." So it looks like this behaviour might be selected for.

Varroa is really nasty. Sometimes the mite causes colony collapse via death by a thousand cuts, sometimes it's like a nuclear bomb went off and sometimes the bees don't even notice (rare).

I've skimmed the paper but it looks good so far. University of Sassari off of Sardinia produces some very pretty and well researched stuff it seems.

Re: Honey bees increase social distancing when facing ectoparasite

#7
post #5

The term "social distancing" was not a thing until the CoVid-19 pandemic, in my experience. It could be a sign of the times so the term is used because it is now popularly understood. The Intro notes that "This hypothesis has been recently confirmed in the ant Lasius niger infected with the fungal pathogen Metarhizium brunneum, which induced behavioral changes ..." So it looks like this behaviour might be selected fo…

It has been part of the literature since the early 1980s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+distanc...

It just wasn't a widely-known term because we didn't have much need for it.

Re: Honey bees increase social distancing when facing ectoparasite

#8
post #7
post #5

The term "social distancing" was not a thing until the CoVid-19 pandemic, in my experience. It could be a sign of the times so the term is used because it is now popularly understood. The Intro notes that "This hypothesis has been recently confirmed in the ant Lasius niger infected with the fungal pathogen Metarhizium brunneum, which induced behavioral changes ..." So it looks like this behaviour might be selected fo…

It has been part of the literature since the early 1980s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+distanc... It just wasn't a widely-known term because we didn't have much need for it.

Cheers mate. Do you have an actual cite rather than a Google assertion?

Re: Honey bees increase social distancing when facing ectoparasite

#9
post #7
post #5

The term "social distancing" was not a thing until the CoVid-19 pandemic, in my experience. It could be a sign of the times so the term is used because it is now popularly understood. The Intro notes that "This hypothesis has been recently confirmed in the ant Lasius niger infected with the fungal pathogen Metarhizium brunneum, which induced behavioral changes ..." So it looks like this behaviour might be selected fo…

It has been part of the literature since the early 1980s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+distanc... It just wasn't a widely-known term because we didn't have much need for it.

Well, we did have a need for it but we just chose to ignore that need. Something like 30,000 people died every year from the regular flu in the USA alone, before pandemic. Social distancing (and masks) would bring that number to close to 0.

So if we're going by metrics of, we'd like to save 30,000 people every year, we absolutely had a need for social distancing all this time. But I get it, our society has a large tolerance for mass death, so in that view, we "didn't have much need for it". But taking that view we still don't have any need for it.

Obviously from my perspective we've had a need for it this whole time but just blissfully ignored that fact.

Re: Honey bees increase social distancing when facing ectoparasite

#10
post #7
post #5

The term "social distancing" was not a thing until the CoVid-19 pandemic, in my experience. It could be a sign of the times so the term is used because it is now popularly understood. The Intro notes that "This hypothesis has been recently confirmed in the ant Lasius niger infected with the fungal pathogen Metarhizium brunneum, which induced behavioral changes ..." So it looks like this behaviour might be selected fo…

It has been part of the literature since the early 1980s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+distanc... It just wasn't a widely-known term because we didn't have much need for it.

We watched the old movie "Outbreak" at the start of Covid, and was surprised that the term "social distancing" is used in that movie to describe mitigations we should use during the pandemic. That movie is from 1995.
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