It was explained to me this is well planned and solved in Czechia. Varroa treatment is refunded my the government, but only one type of medication every 6 months. It's cheaper for beekeepers to use whatever the government gives them for free, than use something else. And the medication is free only for a few weeks, so everyone will use it at the same time.
You can also use drone frames, and remove drone brood during the summer, or cage the queen a period of time. These are both mechanical treatments and obviously doesn't hurt the honey.
Formic acid is one of the few treatments which is acceptable to use while honey is present.
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 past those points. Now it is the mites that get blamed.
The removal of habitats suitable to insects and modern farming certainly plays a part as well.
Honeybees deal fairly well with pesticides, wild bees doesn't[1], but none of them can deal with losing habitats.
1) https://www.biavl.dk/medlemmer/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Bi... (In Danish).
Your response is analogous to how people project meaning onto vapid AI slop which was not present in the process used to generate it. The primary difference being that there is a true meaning behind these words, something against which we can compare your reading. (I would like very much for your reading to turn out to be closer than my reading to what shevy-java intended to say, but I do not expect it.)
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 we are perpetuating a square peg in round hole problem and pushing it very very far right now, at greater and greater cost, all while climate change is fighting us.
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 gone entirely.
Honey bees are not great and reliable pollinators btw.
So the solution is: more genetically modified crops? More pesticides?
Unless “we need to stop our use of pesticides and we should also acknowledge that honey bees are an invasive species and consider making changes to the way we do monocultures” are in the same sentence this entire “honey bees are invasive” argument just feels super weird. Pesticides kill native pollinators. It’s not the honey bees.
Edit: and just to be clear - honey bees do not survive in the wild by themselves anymore due to varroa mites. They essentially depend on humans to protect them. That’s what the entire purpose of this article is about. So, if humans stopped keeping honey bees - they’d have a pretty hard time surviving in the wild on their own.
Regenerative farming and/or permaculture offer ways to run industrial-scale agriculture without the monoculture. See i.e. https://peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10.24072/pcjournal...
Another innovation I see is the use of "crop tunnels" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytunnel) to greatly extend the growing season in colder climates (another poster mentioned "Ohio"), and/or better control evaporation.
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.
In my part of Ohio, we have lots of farmland -- and plenty of water that just falls out of the sky. We've got reasonably-long, generally-hot days during our growing season and we get some serious crop production done here while it lasts.
The rest of the year? The days are short. It's dark and cold outside; frozen, even. We can't grow crops outside here in the winter.
But vertical farms (eg, fancy greenhouses) can just keep going. With artificial light and/or supplemental heat, they're still producing even in the depths of winter.
Thus, I can go to the grocery store near my house and buy a locally-grown tomato in February. It's expensive to get this done, but the alternatives include paying someone to drive it up here from thousands of miles away or just going without a tomato until after things have warmed up again and stayed that way for awhile.
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 harvest green and it takes weeks to hit the table, vs something picked yesterday and picked when actually ripe.
Of course, these are large warehouses, not typical greenouses.
So I guess the answer is, it can make sense in certain circumstances. A warmer place where you can grow fruit outside year round, not so much.
If you're growing extreme-value crops - marijuana, or maybe exotic salad greens for Michelin-starred restaurants - that can actually work.
Otherwise, you're trying to compete with millions of square miles of naturally sun-lit dirt, and extremely efficient modern agro-tech stacks. Bankruptcy awaits.
> just technologist delusions of mine?
I'd bet you've read several articles about techno-utopians setting up vertical farms, and their grand dreams. Which always hand-wave the "how can this massively expensive setup complete with dirt?" part.
Farming sun-lit dirt does not magically require monoculture, nor poor farming practices. The problems is monoculture's appeal to certain human cultures - especially profit-maximizing "big ag" capitalists - and the agricultural policies enacted by naive politicians.
Also, few native North American bee species are eusocial. That's another quality one would need to be able to use them the same way as commercial honeybees are used today.
The there is the issue of honey production.
Neither are horses.
I guess the issue is you don't get honey with the native bees.
The horse ancestor species come from the Americas and migrated to Eurasia over the bearing land bridge.
Horses were only missing from North America for 10,000 of the last 50 million years.
Of all the examples to pick from, seeing GP picked horse made me wonder if GP was doing it for gits and shiggles.
But yes, there are other pollinators like butterflies, moths, flies, birds, etc.
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.
The bees does need to evolve, but not to the point of producing venom. Mechanical mite removal works equally well.
Congratulations, I look forward to your Nobel prize.
> “We screened 50 venoms, mostly from spiders and scorpions, by applying them externally to the mites,” says Herzig.
> “We found more than 75% killed the mites within 24 hours. We selected 2 of the most potent spider venoms for further analysis.”Perhaps it is time to stop blaming the mites for the decline of the honeybees.
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.
"The peptides killed only the mites, while the bees survived."
What benefits do these new treatments offer? They certainly won't be cheaper.
https://www.honeybeesuite.com/can-powdered-sugar-control-var...