Jon
There are some crazy ideas around and breeding for resistance is one of them
I wish you every success
If you are looking for the promised land I would be careful who programs the sat nav
Jon
There are some crazy ideas around and breeding for resistance is one of them
I wish you every success
If you are looking for the promised land I would be careful who programs the sat nav
Breeding for total resistance to varroa is nonsense but some colonies tolerate the mites better than others.Originally Posted by The Drone Ranger
How do you explain the tolerance the Primorsky bees have acquired by coexisting with the mites?
[QUOTE=Jon;18081]One of the ideas on the table is to try and identify colonies which deal with mites better than others - and selectively breed from these.QUOTE]
Hi Jon. Will you be assuming that bees with certain traits deal better with mites, and then looking for these traits? Or will you see which bees deal better, and then look for any particular behaviour they may have?
[QUOTE=Jon;18081]Ideally we would be looking for something where progress could be made in incremental steps.
QUOTE]
After how long would you assume that the bees were surviving, or *leaning towards survival*?
Not Jon but, I'd personally think that anyone attempting to look for tolerance in their bees would be foolish to look for specific traits for fear of missing something else.
I'd also seriously be interested in your personal take on this subject.
I have a friend keeping bees on the Lleyn peninsular, some 50 miles from me as the bee flies across cardigan bay, who swears that he never treats and neither do any of his beekeeping neighbours. This has been going on for a decade now and his theory is that the varroa, associated virus' and bees have reached an equilibrium and are no longer fatal to the bees. He says he often sees cases of DWV in the Spring, but that they clear up naturally during the season. Queens from the area dont cope very well when parachuted into areas with different varroa and other pathogens eg. mine. While I take his tales with a pinch of salt, I've seen his bees and they seem to do fine on this no treatment regime.
I'd imagine if we all stopped treating and moving bees about a similar position would develop in many areas, especially those with a fair degree of geographic isolation.
http://www.queenbees.co.nz/view4.shtml
"the data showed that the best carnica were as varroa tolerant as the average Russian, but the Russians had some serious problems. They were far more nervous and nasty than carnica, much like our mellifera crosses here, and they produced little honey, but their worst trait was their swarming. Without exception the Primorsky bees started trying to swarm early, and they kept trying through until late summer."
You can't believe everything you read but for those who do perhaps a few imported carnie queens will fix varroa
Chris. We have only started to discuss the idea generally. There have been several posts in this thread already have given food for thought. The work that has already been done, mites were collected from the bottom board and examined under a microscope. Some colonies have a far higher percentage of damaged mites than others. I don't have any detail about the methodology so I can't really pass any comment on the accuracy of any findings so far.
My gut feeling would be that any project has to be accessible for the majority of beekeepers and should not require a special skill set or a huge investment time wise.
As MBC commented above, if we stop moving bees around all the time it might be easier to get some stability.
DR - you have got to be joking given the amount of Carnica already introduced into Scotland.
Last edited by Jon; 15-05-2013 at 06:30 PM.
One of the contributors on the Irish Beekeeping List (sadly a list much less active than before - getting a bit BBKA-ish one might say) may be your friend or one of his friends. I'll copy a couple of exchanges below. They've been successfully throwing them off bridges in Lleyn for years as mbc said (perhaps it is the Promised Land) - just as John McL did in Stirlingshire. Pete H's commented in other posts on the geographic specificity and that seemed to fit with John's bees too. He isn't convinced that the effect is coming largely from the bees, but my hunch is that it is a major factor.
G.
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12 Mar 2012
My losses 15 milesish from David [Heaf] are 3 out of 60, 5%, mostly in Nationals with a few 16"x10"s, mostly natural comb as I like to have lots of drones to flood the area with my genetic material, both bees and mites. All bar one building up very strongly now. I`d put it down 100% to local bee genetics.
I would say 45-50% of beeks in Meirionydd and Lleyn are no longer treating, some going back 5 plus years.
Pete H
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19 May 2011
I really don`t know Gavin. My own personal view is that it`s at least equally down to the mites themselves. Tim`s brood pattern at my last inspection was absolutely perfect, as it also was when previously inspected in the company of John Verran, our former RBI a few years back.
Looking at one of my few remaining untreated stocks today there were plenty of visible phoretic mites but an excellent brood pattern with very few misses and no deformed wings, a huge healthy population covering 22 brood frames plus two shallows, from which I took three frames of emerging brood with plenty of stores and some bees to make a nuc. It seemed to me that the mites had laid off breeding at a point well below the damage threshold and were mostly on the bees. If it were the bees doing the controlling I would expect to see virtually no phoretic mites but damage such as DWV paticularly showing, and a plie of deformed corpses below the entrance.
This seems to be the general pattern I`m seeing once bees/mites have settled into an "equillibrium" the brood pattern is generally very good indeed, and very little or no damage, but if a queen starts to fail, or something like last winters sudden drop in temperature upsets the equillibrium, then damage sometimes does start to show, though it isn`t always terminal, and I have seen one colony make a complete recovery over two summer months, when both I and it`s owner had written it off as a dead loss, with a steady procession of DWV victims walking away from the hive.
There are lots of colonies which chuck out infested pupae, probably most I would say, but I don`t think it`s any more than clearing the way for the queen to re-lay the comb. They similarly chuck out slugs and other insects and beasties which wander in, and many can also be periodically seen grooming. I don`t feel either are hugely significant, though I could be wrong.
I think the strategies of AMM types compared to the US mainly more Italian bees seem, at least anecdotaly, to be a bit different, though ultimately achieving the same end result, but the US bees are just a few years ahead, as you might expect, in terms of results, and seem a bit more "hygenic", but their brood patterns don`t look quite so good generally as what I`m seeing.
Most of Meirionydd BKA and other beeks in that area seem to be managing without treatment and I would say Llyn and Eifionydd are heading that way, especially the younger ones, but last winter`s sudden cold snap was a setback for some of those with larger apiaries, on the Lleyn particularly. That said, looking at my own, once the colonies have pulled away the mites seem to be stabilising once again and there`s nothing remotely like the mite buildup we used to see five or six years ago. Keeping smaller apiaries seems to be of primary importance at this stage, though I this week heard of one person not treating varroa who has an apiary of around 15 hives, albeit in one of the areas most favoured spots, but most successful non-treaters have only one, two or occasionally three hives on a site.
Pete H
From: Gavin Ramsay <xxx@xxx.co.uk>
To: irishbeekeeping@yahoogroups.co.uk
Sent: Thursday, 19 May 2011, 21:28
Subject: Re: [IBNewList] Re: Bees thriving as never before???
>Have you seen this yourself?
Hi Chris and All
Thanks Pete. Do you think Tim's bees control mites mostly by grooming or are
they strongly hygienic too?
I have watched bees in the observation hive of someone with Varroa-tolerant bees
in central Scotland, and seen these bouts of active grooming. My ordinary bees
do it too. I haven't witnessed a bee grabbing and damaging the mites but I do
have in a box somewhere samples of the mites dropping in his colonies and he
assures me that he has seen it happening himself. Some of his colonies leave
mites undamaged but some leave mites with nicks in the idiosoma, and antennae
and legs neatly sheared off. The dents vary - some look bee-made, others could
be developmental defects.
That talk last week relied heavily on videos. This one (which I've posted here
before) leaves no doubt that bees will grapple with parasites. The bee around 4
min knocks a Braula off its back and stands on three legs while the other three
grapple with the critter, apparently trying to manouvre it towards its
mouthparts. There are bees elsewhere in the video having a go at Varroa.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSGa9DKraGA
Bees grooming:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsQx3rbc-98
Also try Ron Hoskins' pictures here:
http://www.moraybeedinosaurs.co.uk/stanton_park.html
There are dimples seen on Varroa which are not due to bees:
http://www.apidologie.org/index.php?...83/m08083.html
but amputations at least are clearly the work of bees.
best wishes
Gavin
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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DR is just about always joking! In case anyone is interested, John's bees were a mix of local native Amm types (more Amm-looking than many I've seen) and a Buckfast type with no sign of carnie-ness. The Buckfast seemed fairly strongly VSH, the Amms and the hybrids less so but still keeping on top of Varroa.
If you haven't already done so it may be worth checking out the experiences of the Cornish breeding group. They were full of enthusiasm and ideas but have been rather quiet lately. James Kilty and Rodger Dewhurst.
http://www.jameskilty.co.uk/beekeepi...nceProject.pdf
http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Rodger-Dewhurst/1384425144
http://www.cbibbg.co.uk/
http://www.theecologist.org/how_to_m...rroa_mite.html
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