Bees with resistance to varroa mites

[The Drone Ranger]

I was thinking about doing the stacked bar graph thing again
It shows the whole apiary as a sort of single entity

[Jon]

This year was a low mite count year for a lot of beekeepers I know, probably due to the exceptionally long brood break last winter and spring.
My bees were rearing brood until the end of October this year and some likely still have a bit of brood so mite levels will have risen a lot since September.
That drop of 800 mites shocked me as this was a colony which had a negligible mite load when I treated in June.
I suppose 100 mites early September could have grown to a population of 800 after 3 generations of brood up to November

[The Drone Ranger]

here's a link http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/pub..._NO_115=161315
These guys were trying to measure effect of crossing with Russian bees
A difference of 58% in capped cells to 48% in capped cells it seems ?

[prakel]

NIHBS bought 100 shaker sample jars from Germany which were distributed a couple of weeks ago.
This first year is just a pilot as a lot of people had already started treating by the time we got the sampling equipment and mite levels have to be recorded before treatment starts.

This thread just came to mind while reading Erik Osterlund's latest blog. I'm going to link it as there's a great diy shaker jar tutorial for those who like to play around in the workshop:

http://www.elgon.es/diary/?p=660

[Jon]

Whateverway you do it, using a shaker with a measured amount of bees is the only accurate way to get a mite count.
Fera is still promoting the counting of mites which drop through the mesh floor.

[prakel]

Whateverway you do it, using a shaker with a measured amount of bees is the only accurate way to get a mite count.
Fera is still promoting the counting of mites which drop through the mesh floor.

They struggle to get through our solid floors so that's not much use here!

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Any news on the project Jon?

[Jon]

The project is underway. I had a letter from the PHD student doing the work last week.
I hope to get an update on the NIHBS site soon.
Still very early days.

[prakel]

Not seen the actual paper yet but this news feed looks quite interesting:

http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=...5&e=57f94334d8

“The study is a unique and powerful contribution to understanding how honeybees have been impacted by the introduction of Varroa destructor, and how, if left alone, they can evolve resistance to this deadly parasite,” said Thomas Seeley, the Horace White Professor in Biology at Cornell and the paper’s senior author. Sasha Mikheyev ’00, an assistant professor of ecology and evolution at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan, is the paper’s first author.

edit: this is the link to the paper (link added after busybeephillip's post #109):

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/15...comms8991.html

[busybeephilip]

I wonder how they take account of bees breeding with the like of sue cobeys varroa resistant strains since they only seem to be looking at mito DNA and not genomic

[The Drone Ranger]

Not sure about the "if left alone ......resistance" bit
That's not what I felt they were trying to say
More a loss of genetic diversity among survivors
I thought all the CCD losses were made up by package bees probably from a few sources
Possibly Australian ?
They have tried to eliminate other reasons in fairness but with bees that's not easy