Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees
connectsci.au113 points by Jedd 4 hours ago
113 points by Jedd 4 hours ago
Check out Paul Stamets' research using Mycelium to give honeybees an immuneboost.
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 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 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 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.
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.
I think it's hard to generalize whether vertical farms are good or bad; efficient or inefficient. It seems that whether it works or not relies very heavily on the locality.
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.
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 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.
>>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
Good point. We need to genetically modify horses that can pollinate plants and create honey.
A quite similar horse species went extinct in North America ~10,000 years ago likely due to humans.
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.
I was about to say the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse#Equus
Of all the examples to pick from, seeing GP picked horse made me wonder if GP was doing it for gits and shiggles.
You could pick up a catalog from any of these places and find half a dozen different species of bees to cultivate for pollination. Blue mason bees come to mind. Anything that's even slightly domesticatable is being pursued. Some of these bees are loners too, perfect for the hipster crowd.
If they are not native, how did plant propagate seeds? Flies? Wasps? Butterflies?
Native bees. Apis mellifera are introduced bees across most of the world.
But yes, there are other pollinators like butterflies, moths, flies, birds, etc.
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.
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.
To add, varroa quickly gains immunity to the pharmaceutical treatment we have, so the same medication cannot be used 2 years in a row. Most popular treatment from late 90s that used to kill 99% of varroa is now completely ineffective.
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.
Depending on location acid treatments can only be done after the honey harvest anyway, due to temperatures, so it's a minor issue.
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.
> 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.
Last I checked researchers were trying to evolve bees to be mite resistant. Is this something you've come across?
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 past those points. Now it is the mites that get blamed.
People who believe these types of things tend to get their information from the same places. Which podcasts do you listen to?
One day bees will evolve to produce spider venom
Asian bees are perfectly capable of removing and killing mites as is. So are some breed species of European honey bees. There have been found abandoned apiary in France where the bees have evolved to groom themselves and remove the mites.
The bees does need to evolve, but not to the point of producing venom. Mechanical mite removal works equally well.
Some potentially seriously good news there if it all pans out the way it sounds like it might. Fingers crossed for the bees!
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.
Nah, it cannot happen that Big Agro's poisons are to fault...
Pesticides are bad for bees, but Varroa is too. Until Varroa arrived in Australia the bees there didn't suffer from colony collapse, despite high pesticide use.
Big Ag was already using those poisons before varroa, so if it was the cause, you would've seen it manifest before varroa.
It seems that varroa were first discovered in North America in 1987. [1] Glyphosate use at that time was around 4,500 metric tons. By 2014 we were up to 125,000 metric tons [2]. There was an exponential increase coming after 1996 when glyphosate resistant GMO crops became a thing. I don't have an opinion on this topic one way or the other, but there seem to be quite a lot of negative correlates since then, and this is just another one. Of course correlation doesn't mean causation, but you can't completely dismiss it.
How did they screen for this venom?
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!
Another terrible MCU spin-off
So what's it going to do to the honey? Will we have spider venom laced honey?
As article suggest - it is fully biodegradable. I suppose venom has some short half-life. And since peptide is isolated, not full chain toxin, it should be harmless to humans.
I'd imagine eating it has a different effect than having it directly enter the bloodstream as well.
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.