Varroa & Resistance

[heaflaw]

Cowpollinator,

You make an excellent argument and you are more knowlegeable and experienced than I and most of the people on this site. So, these are questions and not arguments:

1. Could it be that if your VSH and/or Russians were away from the drifting in of bees with varroa from your other hives (or neighbors or ferals) that they would not have to do as much brood removal and would become effective pollinators?

2. Do any of the commercial beekeepers use VSH or Russians successfully as pollinators?

[cow pollinater]

You make an excellent argument

Thank you.

and you are more knowlegeable and experienced than I and most of the people on this site.

Not even close. Thank you kindly but I'm not even close. I'm just a dummy who like to watch bees when he gets home from work.

Could it be that if your VSH and/or Russians were away from the drifting in of bees with varroa from your other hives (or neighbors or ferals) that they would not have to do as much brood removal and would become effective pollinators?

Yes, it could very well be. The russians, not so much as they just flat shut down and almonds are about the first thing to bloom here... Hard to build them up... VSH, Here in central CA, I can raise brood pretty much year round, which means I can raise mites year round. To get a level of genetic mite resistance to keep mites under a level that doesn't harm my ability to have bees strong enough to pollinate I have to kill a few on my own. I DO HAVE some VSH/Myn Hygenic queens bred to drones from who knows what that have kind of held their own with drone brood removal in the early spring.

2. Do any of the commercial beekeepers use VSH or Russians successfully as pollinators?

I have no idea. I don't speak to enough of them to get a real feel for the industry. I just comment on what I see in my own bees.

[sylus p]

So I have this vinyl tubing in my honey house that i use to siphon amitraz, fluvalinate, coumophous, oxcalic (you get the picture) with. I also use this tube when i extract honey to pump the honey from tank to tank with. I sort of rinse it out with water between uses.

I don't have the answers. Varroa mites really do take colonies apart, they are humbling little buggers. They don't take every colony apart though. And I like that.

[heaflaw]

Question:
Could it be that if your VSH and/or Russians were away from the drifting in of bees with varroa from your other hives (or neighbors or ferals) that they would not have to do as much brood removal and would become effective pollinators?

Answer:
Yes, it could very well be. The russians, not so much as they just flat shut down and almonds are about the first thing to bloom here... Hard to build them up... VSH, Here in central CA, I can raise brood pretty much year round, which means I can raise mites year round. To get a level of genetic mite resistance to keep mites under a level that doesn't harm my ability to have bees strong enough to pollinate I have to kill a few on my own. I DO HAVE some VSH/Myn Hygenic queens bred to drones from who knows what that have kind of held their own with drone brood removal in the early spring.

Question:
So, if we could get to the point where no one treats and mites are not continually being spread back & forth, would the bees be able to keep the mites well under control and be as effective pollinators as are the current treated bees? Ending treatments completely may be far in the future. The guys who make a living beekeeping cannot just stop cold turkey(for obvious economical reasons). But as the evidence mounts that CCD was partly caused by accumulations of mite pesticides in comb, and as organic methods become more appreciated, and as the scientists keep breeding better resistant bees, it just looks like that is the direction we are headed. 10 years from now the battle in beekeeping may be between the hobbyists who don't treat and the professionals who do. The hobbyists will be mad because the professionals are speading varroa to our hives.

[Hambone]

Originally Posted by heaflaw

2. Do any of the commercial beekeepers use VSH or Russians successfully as pollinators?

4th post.

[mike bispham]

Originally Posted by cow pollinater

BUT... both the VSH and Russians use brood rearing as a defense. VSH bees actively remove brood that is infested and part of the russians resistance is the hard shutdown of brood-rearing at the first hint of cool weather...
Pollination is what feeds the world. Pollination requires strong colonies. Strong colonies are made with LOTS of BROOD. Therefore, pollination is not done with bees that don't produce wall to wall brood.

Hi Cow pollinater,

My take on these sorts of complaints is that we're just starting out, and the main job right now is to breed in resistance and what I call self-sufficiency - really just rude health, strength, all-round survival value.

However at the same time we can select for other traits. The old guy who taught me had, with his pals, spent a lifetime fine-tuning our local bees. I reckon he aimed at strength and vitality first, and only then for things like productivity and ease of handling. (He was also in charge of a very large garden , and has lots of opportunity to get the right sorts of things growing at the right sorts of times - which I reckon helped a lot)

You define strength as large colonies - but is that really the case? Might not say two smaller colonies that do the work of one large one, and are more reliable, actually be preferable?

I don't think it will take you long - if you have a good measure of control over who your queens mate with - to raise a local strain that is perfect for your needs. You'll never be happy with it of course - what true artist is every happy with his work - and some years you'll know you've gone backwards.

There are any number of mechanisms that contribute to mite resistance - and resistance to other problems too. We may know the major ones now, but we'll probably never know them all. Some combinations will work better than others. I think the current VSH offerings are might turn out to be just crude beginnings, something to get you started. I can see in a few years time we'll have learned how to build bees we'd die for right now - and how to keep them simply and reliably. The best artists will flourish then, way way ahead of those who maintain a lego-brick approach. Bees are a beautiful complex life-form, one of the wonders of nature, and we're in a position now to truly begin to appreciate just how incredible nature is through them, and to handle them as competently as they've ever bee handled.

Good luck (and apologies for waxing lyrical there),

Mike

PS thanks moderator and others for support back there. It makes all the difference.

[mike bispham]

Originally Posted by Tom G. Laury

Well, arrogance invites irritation. If Mr Bispham was raising resistant bees he would have alot more credibility on this forum.

Tom, a lot of beekeepers start and stop and start again for a multitude of reasons. In my case I decided to go again last year, when it seemed clear to me that things were improving and raising resistant bees from scratch was a possibility, and I had located a good patch to keep them on. I'm now waiting for planning permission to put up a compound and keep a storage caravan onsite, and hopefully in spring I'll be getting underway.

I agree I'd have more credibility if I'd been doing it for some years already. But 25 years of bee-caring is not to be sneezed at, and book-learning ain't always a bad thing. If you look at my website you'll see I've done some homework.

If I come across as arrogant at times the feeling is often mutual! To think you know all there is about bees because you've managed keep a couple of nucs on their feet with the help of treatments for a year or two seems pretty arrogant to me! But I apologise. I value the huge range of experience on hand in the forums enormously.

Mike

[mike bispham]

Originally Posted by heaflaw

[...] The guys who make a living beekeeping cannot just stop cold turkey(for obvious economical reasons).

Hi Heaflaw

Its my understanding that any operation can shift gradually from treatment-based regimes to selection-based regimes without even temporary economic loss. I don't think there is any need for anyone to go cold turkey - just systematically multiplying the best and requeening the worst, while going as light-touch as you can with treatments gets you there. The more ill-adapted the current stock is the longer it will take, but that's all.

Originally Posted by heaflaw

But as the evidence mounts that CCD was partly caused by accumulations of mite pesticides in comb, and as organic methods become more appreciated, and as the scientists keep breeding better resistant bees, it just looks like that is the direction we are headed.

I think the breeding will come more in all sorts of common apiaries than in labs. As more and more people cotton on, and some become nerdish about it (and they will) we'll have superb bees coming out of very ordinary locations. Its just such a joyful thing to do that more and more sharp, interested and motivated people will make improvements in leaps and bounds.

Originally Posted by heaflaw

10 years from now the battle in beekeeping may be between the hobbyists who don't treat and the professionals who do. The hobbyists will be mad because the professionals are speading varroa to our hives.

I reckon the slowest of the professionals will be offering the rest good money to come and show them how its done within a year or two!

Mike

[cow pollinater]

You define strength as large colonies - but is that really the case?

Yes.

Might not say two smaller colonies that do the work of one large one, and are more reliable, actually be preferable? .

No.
That's not how it works. Weak colonies never have a strong field force and therefore produce less per bee than a strong colony. An eight frame hive will collect something like three or four times the amount of pollen that a four framer will. All of the extra bees are foragers whereas with a dink half the bees are tied up with housekeeping chores. You are better off to have to few strong hives for the job than to have twice as many weaklings.

[deknow]

...but here's the problem.

different populations of bees display all kinds of different kinds of behaviors. "hygenic behavior" and vsh are among them, and they are found in various degrees.

hygenic behavior will, if at a very high level (i think 94% or above) have an impact on mites, and on afb (and probably other microbial diseases). this is a threshold, not a continuum (ie, 89% doesn't demonstrate somewhat mite/afb resistance).

if, however, one looks at feral populations of bees that show resistance to mites and afb, one finds that they show a wide range of hygenic behavior...and i'm fairly certain that no feral population shows anything like the 94% needed to be effective. these populations use other mechanisms...ones that are less metabolically "expensive" than such a high level of brood removal.

an analogy: you are staffing your honey house. in order to best meet the health codes and provide your customers with a top quality product, you decide that you want employees that wash their hands regularly so they do not spread disease. this is all as it should be.

but here is where it all goes wrong...you decide to screen applicants, and pick those that wash their hands the most...if handwashing is good, then the most handwashing is the best...except that it's not. you end up with a shop full of OCD handwashers who don't get too much work done (they are always washing their hands), and they might even end up with fungal infections from overwashing (and killing off the bacteria that naturally live on the skin and prevent fungal infections). a sanitary and healthy habit of handwashing becomes a distraction and health hazard when taken to the extreme.

if one is agressively selecting for hygenic behavior to achieve some level of mite resistance, one is also selecting against stable and more efficient traits.

to breed for resistance, one must breed for survival first...and nature is the only one qualified to make the culling decisions.

deknow