Bees with resistance to varroa mites

[fatshark]

Fatshark, do you still see that Martin paper as very relevant to all this or have things moved on apace since it was published?

Yes and yes.

The paper from Steve Martin set the scene at a landscape level. There are additional studies since which clearly demonstrate the same thing at the individual bee level - one thing will lead to the other. Brenda Ball first isolated DWV pre-Varroa (by which I mean before it got to the UK, not before DWV evolved ... just in case Brenda reads this ). It's found where there's no Varroa (including Australia, for example in the recent paper in Nature from the Exeter group) and - if your assays are sensitive enough - in every bee you care to drop into liquid nitrogen, grind into a fine powder and extract the nucleic acid from.

[Emma]

Feeling loss over bees is a tricky area. Every bee I ever keep will die. Most of them only live a few short months. When a colony dies we really have a failure to produce the next generation of bees... the old bees were dying anyway. That doesn't mean I'm not a bit disappointed when it happens, but I try not to get emotionally attached to each one.

I find a similar issue with requeening. If you remove/kill an old queen and replace her with a younger one you colony hasn't really survived - it is a new colony with a new mother. The old queens genetic line is gone and is usually lost.

So while I don't view bees as a purely financial cost, I also try not get too emotionally attached to my colonies. I feel this helps me to make better, more balanced decisions about their management.

Bees at the colony level are a different creature to bees individually. An individual bee dying is a different matter to the silence of a deadout, or to the distress of bees dying en masse with no hope of colony survival. It's partly about length of life, partly about what is passed on to the future, partly about quality of life while it lasts. You know all that!

I agree that changing a queen - especially to one from a different line - can mean the end of that colony. But I've also seen the change in mood in a collection of bees when they cease to be a dwindling sisterhood making doomed drone-pupa queen cells, and instead become part of a queenright colony. Got one in my apiary that's still got a 'zing' to it months after that happening.

I'm afraid that I get a bit impatient with people claiming that their management decisions are better because they're not too emotional. All our decisions, ultimately, come to down to motivations which are emotional in nature. Our fundamental reasons for keeping bees and for the decisions we make about them, are to do with our emotions, same as our reasons for anything else we do. The driving force could be anything from gaining comfort and companionship from the bees' presence, to experiencing them simply as a challenging opportunity to demonstrate our skills and mastery. What you'd said made me curious as to where you were on that spectrum.

Cheers

[mbc]

I'm also uncomfortable with the idea of bees being a fungible commodity, each colony is so much more than merely a collection of bees and a queen, once established they have a history and arguably a memory and a common purpose going forward, the idea that they are pre-programmed robots responding automatically to stimuli might be correct to a research scientist but misses the point for this beekeeper.

[Calluna4u]

DWV was seen here intermittently, and not fatally, for many many years before varroa arrived on the scene. It was most noticeable, indeed almost exclusively seen, in drones. Whole patches would hatch with deformed wings. In the days before we read much outside our observations we assumed it to be linked to mild chilling or the slower development of the drones. It was common. Only post varroa did we read much about it and find out the cause.


To the point by Jon about the NZ carnica drones in the Swindon area? Well apparently we destroyed the whole project in one move (according to some posters) yet were several miles away at closest point, and the number of colonies we put in was substantially less than the number of Hawaiian derived crosses that were in situ before.

[fatshark]

C4U ... I've heard the reports of chilling producing similar symptoms to DWV before. How similar were the symptoms? Did they include the abdominal 'stunting' that's sometimes seen as well as the characteristic wing atrophy?

[Calluna4u]

C4U ... I've heard the reports of chilling producing similar symptoms to DWV before. How similar were the symptoms? Did they include the abdominal 'stunting' that's sometimes seen as well as the characteristic wing atrophy?

For the most part the drones looked normal apart from the withered wings. However in some cases they did show stunted and imperfect growth. Didn't think anything of it till I saw my first real DWV cases and realised I had seen the exact same symptoms in the past, read more about it, and it all joined up. Would still suspect that the majority of the shrivelled wing drones were linked to a developmental problem, with temperature a prime cause. Some otherwise strong colonies would barely raise a sound drone, and those that were there might well have been drifting incomers.

[mbc]

Virgin queens are prone to stunted wings if cells have been messed about with at inappropriate times, almost certainly not linked to dwv but very similar to peripheral drones sometimes chilling.

[Kate Atchley]

Virgin queens are prone to stunted wings if cells have been messed about with at inappropriate times, almost certainly not linked to dwv but very similar to peripheral drones sometimes chilling.

The only time I've seen deformed wings was after I had "messed about" with bees. I trickled OA through a newly-created nuc with frames from two barely-infested colonies, including some brood, and later saw a few young workers and drones with deformed wings. It seemed the brood had been affected. I assumed that this was the OA doing damage, not the effects of DWV as the mite levels were negligible.

[The Drone Ranger]

I don't think that's a side effect of treatment Kate

Sent from my LIFETAB_S1034X using Tapatalk

[Kate Atchley]

I don't think that's a side effect of treatment Kate

Sent from my LIFETAB_S1034X using Tapatalk

John, it was the year varroa was first found here and levels were very low and the infestation new. Could this have been full-blown DWV? I saw only a few young bees effected and none later or since.

What do folk reckon was the cause?