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Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

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Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#31

Post by wizzwizz4 »

shevy-java wrote: post #5
roboben wrote: post #3

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.

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 p…

People who believe these types of things tend to get their information from the same places. Which podcasts do you listen to?

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#33

Post by brikym »

tamimio wrote: post #27

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!

I leave the wolf spiders as they don't make webs.

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#34

Post by brikym »

roboben wrote: post #3

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.

Last I checked researchers were trying to evolve bees to be mite resistant. Is this something you've come across?

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#35

Post by nerbert »

gadders wrote: post #21
schainks wrote: post #15

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…

>>Honeybees are not native to North America. Neither are horses. I guess the issue is you don't get honey with the native bees.

Neither with horses

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#36

Post by Jedd »

halflife wrote: post #16
schainks wrote: post #15

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…

If they are not native, how did plant propagate seeds? Flies? Wasps? Butterflies?

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.

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#37

Post by mrweasel »

shevy-java wrote: post #4

Still the honeybees keep on dying ... Perhaps it is time to stop blaming the mites for the decline of the honeybees.

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.

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#38

Post by j4k0bfr »

mastermage wrote: post #28
looping__lui wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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.

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#40

Post by moebrowne »

roboben wrote: post #3

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.

> 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.

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