treatment free beekeeping - the risks

[pedrocr]

the flaw in your point as i see has to do with what is called threshold. if the amount of pathogen that they 'get' exceeds that which their immunity can handle you will get disease. if your are not convinced that robbing can lead to levels of pathogen that exceed this threshold, then maybe there is no convincing you.

I agree that there's a threshold to be overcome between a hive having a pathogen at all and having it in enough concentrations to cause disease. It's just my understanding that once a hive is infected if it's not naturally resistant the pathogens will multiply and you will cross the threshold anyway. So imagine these two scenarios with two hives, one yours, one your neighbor's. Pathogen A exists in your neighbor's hive and causes disease after some threshold. Now:

- Your neighbour doesn't treat, his hive dies, is robbed out by your hive, bringing back enough Pathogen A to pass the threshold. You get disease.
- Your neighbour treats, his hive doesn't die yet still caries the pathogen as the treatment doesn't eradicate it. Your hive still comes into contact with the pathogen at lower dosages, it multiplies inside your hive, passes the threshold and you get disease.

So in these two cases the result is the same. Now the interesting case, and this might be where you're coming from is this scenario:

- Your neighbour treats, his hives don't die yet still carry the pathogen as the treatment doesn't erradicate it. Your hive still comes into contact with the pathogen at lower dosages, it multiplies inside your hive but not enough to pass the threshold and cause disease. If at any point your neighbor's hive dies and your bees rob it, the threshold gets passed and you get disease.

Is this a good characterization of what you're thinking? I see where this could be the case if your hive has enough resistance to Pathogen A to keep a small concentration at bay but enough concentration overcomes that resistance and allows multiplication. I don't know if that kind of fragile equilibrium is common in our hives.

and i certainly respect your right to your point of view.

It's not really a point of view as I'm far too inexperience to have one. It's just the extent of my limited understanding.

[WLC]

squarepeg:

He's too inexperienced to have a point of view, yet he goes on and on...



Would Barry stoop to using a 'sockpuppet'?

Heh, heh.

[squarepeg]

i'll give it one more shot pedro, i'm still having fun here. and let me reiterate that my purpose for starting this thread was to give up and coming beekeepers the 'other side' of the 'treatment free' approach.

again, the problem with your scenario is that i don't know of any way my bees are going to be contaminated by my neighbor's bees unless my neighbor's bees get so sick and weak that they succumb to robbing by my bees.

you say that you are sure there are other ways, but are you sure? when you find out what they are, let me know and we might be able to pursue that line of argument.

[JRG13]

There's a similar premise in agriculture. You can have resistant varieties. RNA viruses are a little easier to knock out, DNA viruses can usually still be detected even in resistant lines. the problem there is obvious, that plant can still vector the virus and now you have a population of the virus living in your resistant line. This is how breaking strains are created, levels of infection below threshold for your resistance which allows the pathogen to mutate to become more virulent. I look at it this way... even if I had mite resistant bees, I would monitor mite levels and try to eradicate them if their numbers get too high. Why stress the bees when you don't have to and why harbor large pathogen loads that might evolve to break your resistance.

[sqkcrk]

If I remember correctly, it took approximately 5 (correct me if wrong) years for AHB to travel on their own "legs"(winds) from Brazil all way to California, Texas etc. Perhaps, we just underestimate the ability for wild/feral bees to travel and potentially spread diseases.

Since you asked for correction here it is. Fifty years, not 5. AHB originated in Brazil in 1953 or 54. The year I was born or the year after. The natural outward migration took 50 plus years to get thru the highest concentration of beehives in the Americas, Mexico, and into the United States and it's further outward migration has slowed since getting to where it is in the US now.

[sqkcrk]

Is there not a threshold level in the number of organisms necessary to initiate contagion.

Yes crofter, regarding AFB there certainly is a threshold level of spores necassary to initiate contagion in a honey bee larvae. There is also a threshold level for varroa, though this is somewhat harder to determine, though some will say that there is a specific treatment threeshold. The same is true for Nosema. It is 1,000,000 spores per bee. But this figure is contested by the likes of Randy Oliver because how Nosema impacts a colony of bees is not precise or certain.

[JRG13]

I saw a documentary on how they got released, it was pretty interesting.

[WLC]

JRG:

RNA viruses were shown to be vectored by pollen. In fact, they suspect that these viruses may be inside the pollen itself. They've shown that these picorna viruses were pretty much ubiquitous and in many hymenopterans sampled.

Evolution in those virus pools is certainly a major issue.

So, why help things along? I feel that we need to use an approach to obtaining treatment-free bees that isn't as vulnerable to the current conditions as they've been described in the scientific literature.

We keep hearing about 'natural selection', but the TFB advocates seem to forget about the evoution part.

Bond: Live and Let Die TFBs aren't up to the challenges presented by the current picorna virus landscape in the environment.

We need to be alot smarter about this than we've been in the past.

[Joseph Clemens]

Howdy ho, there buckaroo's --> I think I hear a version of this poem being spoken here. Poem

Or maybe it's the one about the chicken and the egg.

[sqkcrk]

I saw a documentary on how they got released, it was pretty interesting.

I would like to see that documentary to see if it jives w/ the mythology.

[squarepeg]

Howdy ho, there buckaroo's --> I think I hear a version of this poem being spoken here. Poem

Or maybe it's the one about the chicken and the egg.

sorry joseph, i don't get it. can you explain?

[jbeshearse]

One thing to remember here. When we treat (poison) varroa we are not creating a super
Mite that is any more virulent to the bees. The Supermite is resistant to the poison. That is all. We are not building resistance in the mite to any naturally evolving bee characteristic. We are actually stressing the mite and making it evolve and select resistance to our treatments . Could this actually make the mite less capable of developing a resistance to bee evolved solutions?

[cerezha]

... migration took 50 plus years to get ... in the Americas, Mexico, and into the United States....

Mark, many thanks for clarification. Let see. What is the distance between US and Brazil? Let's guess 4500 miles (probably more), 90 miles/yr. Slow but it still could explains how Varroa get into isolated area situated 100 miles from the near affected apiary within few years... Also,for varroa, I would imagine that migration speed would be much higher since it does not require bee reproduction as in case of AHBs.

[Joseph Clemens]

The discussion in this thread has basically been extrapolated from one small experimental investigation into the world of hymenoptera and gives a tiny glimpse into their world -- to me such a myopic view into that world is like the Elephant and the Six blind scholars. To base such broad assumptions on such a small view of the picture, reminds me of that poem.

And the chicken and egg analogy --> What came first the virus or the bee? Or, where did the virus originate, with the wild hymenoptera or with the Apis mellifera? If, as is mentioned in the paper, that some of these viruses seem to be unique to North America, and the honey bee isn't, how then can the honey bee be seen as the origination of these viruses?

[JRG13]

WLC,

I pretty much said that in my first post in this thread minus a pure treatment free approach. I totally agree with the evolution and selection scheme. I hear a lot about survivor stock and it would be nice to correlate it to something tangible.

We manipulate behavior enough to suit our own needs and combat mites and disease to some extent as well.

Mark, I think it was on Netflix, basic thing was, that guy in Brazil wanted to produce the King honey cropping bee. So he collected a bunch of queens in Africa and brought them back here. They had the hives screened off so the queen's couldn't leave until some temporary contractor came along on his first day, thought to himself, who would screen up hives like that, removed them all and all the bees absconded. I didn't quite understand why they would all just abscond though.

[squarepeg]

The discussion in this thread has basically been extrapolated from one small experimental investigation into the world of hymenoptera and gives a tiny glimpse into their world -- to me such a myopic view into that world is like the Elephant and the Six blind scholars. To base such broad assumptions on such a small view of the picture, reminds me of that poem.

And the chicken and egg analogy --> What came first the virus or the bee? Or, where did the virus originate, with the wild hymenoptera or with the Apis mellifera? If, as is mentioned in the paper, that some of these viruses seem to be unique to North America, and the honey bee isn't, how then can the honey bee be seen as the origination of these viruses?

still not sure what you're getting at.

to which 'broad assumptions' are you referring to?

[Joseph Clemens]

Abscond, maybe they were Apis mellifera scutellata or hybrids thereof. Abscond is one of the things AHB are known for, and they seem to do it more often than any other honey bee species or hybrid.

[Joseph Clemens]

Maybe the assumptions being expounded by the non-treatment and treatment factions alike:

Such as the assumption that the viruses found in the pollen were originating with the honey bees and not with the other hymenoptera species. (Chicken and the egg analogy).

Or that non-treated bees were primarily responsible for vectoring pathogens to hymenoptera species, instead of the other way around. I see this as an unproven theory, expounded by the author, but without convincing supporting evidence - it appears to be assumed. All I see proven is that some wild hymenoptera species, pollen, and honey bees all share some of the same viruses.

The Elephant and blind men poem --> Are managed and untreated honey bee colonies responsible for vectoring viruses to pollen and wild hymenoptera species? Are managed and treated honey bee colonies responsible for vectoring viruses to pollen and wild hymenoptera species? Much more work would need to be done in this line of research, before I would feel confident I had any idea what the actual scene was. (Hence the Elephant and blind man poem reference).

[JRG13]

All kept bees are responsible for vectoring. Maybe absconding was the wrong word, but the way they showed it, was basically as soon as the screens were opened, the queen left and the hive followed her. I just didn't understand why they would want to leave so immediately unless they were so undomesticated they really didn't want anything to do with a man built hive. They were housed in the hives awhile before the screens were removed.

[Joseph Clemens]

I spent a little more than a decade keeping nothing but bees that exhibited most of the behaviors described for AHB; they were likely AHB, but I never bothered to have them tested.

An analogy would be that they do resort to many unpleasant and undesirable behaviors, "at the drop of a hat".

An example would be: I once screened a captured, likely AHB swarm, into its hive, feeding them and watching to see that their queen had begun to lay and the eggs to hatch. I then opened their entrance. The next day the box was empty, but the eggs and larvae were still there. A few days later I discovered that they had moved into another nuc, about seven colonies over from where they had been, they had killed the resident queen and taken over that hive. So they exhibited absconding and usurpation, both common AHB traits.