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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

#91

Post by anjel »

b112 wrote: post #44
j4k0bfr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 ha…

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.

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#92

Post by throwaway2037 »

CommonGuy wrote: post #80
throwaway2037 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some light research on the topic. 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 > Varroa sensitive hygiene (VSH) is a behavioral trait of honey bees (Apis melli…

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…

    > 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.

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#93

Post by dqv »

looping__lui wrote: post #22
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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#94

Post by dreamcompiler »

thatspartan wrote: post #64
tomaytotomato wrote: post #32

Check out Paul Stamets' research using Mycelium to give honeybees an immuneboost. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32194-8

TIL that the Star Trek Stamets character is based on a real world Paul Stamets working on actual Mycelium. Wow

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.

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#95

Post by temp0826 »

thatspartan wrote: post #64
tomaytotomato wrote: post #32

Check out Paul Stamets' research using Mycelium to give honeybees an immuneboost. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32194-8

TIL that the Star Trek Stamets character is based on a real world Paul Stamets working on actual Mycelium. Wow

TIL that there is a character based off him in Star Trek??

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#96

Post by temp0826 »

colordrops wrote: post #73
homeonthemtn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why should I do anything but take your anonymous comment with a huge grain of salt. Is the irony completely lost here?

He uses his rep to hawk overpriced supplements

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#97

Post by dqv »

bregma wrote: post #58
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…

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…

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.

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#98

Post by somenameforme »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #20
shevy-java wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes the mites are what kills the bees. What is that asssumption is flawed?

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.

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.

[1] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/bee-alert-is-a-controversial-...

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#99

Post by andai »

worldvoyageur wrote: post #78

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 te…

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?

Re: Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

#100

Post by ghssds »

anjel wrote: post #90
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…

Robotic polinators ftw.

I saw that Black Mirror episode.
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