The Honey Bee is Facing an Existential Threat - and It Could Be Very Bad for Humans

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The Honey Bee is Facing an Existential Threat - and It Could Be Very Bad for Humans
By David Dodwell, South China Morning Post/ Science/ Business Insider/ businessinsider.com

"Three hundred feet up in the air, dangling on a hand-made rope ladder, with a 25 foot bamboo pole held in one arm, Kulung tribesman Mauli Dhan fights off savage, pulsing swarms of giant Himalayan honey bees for one of the only things that links him to the world economy – "mad honey."

Millions worldwide go to less lunatic lengths to capture the fruits of the labour of the world’s three trillion or so honey bees, but it is a tribute to the global value of the honey bee and its nectar that even here high in Nepal, just 10 miles or so from Mount Everest, humans risk life and limb for it.

The panic is not simply because no-one can agree on the cause of the collapse, nor because of fears that there might be a grave global shortage of honey, but because of the critical role honey bees play in pollinating much of the food we eat today.

Even on the issue of honey bees’ role in pollination there is fervent disagreement over whether panic is justified or not. First, most of our staple foods don’t rely on bees for pollination. Crops like wheat, rice, corn, soya, sorghum, rye, parley and oats are all wind pollinated. Vegetables like lettuce, beans and tomatoes are self-pollinators. But that leaves a large and delicious part of our diet still wholly or significantly dependent on bees and other insect pollinators – like almonds, raspberries, apples and pears, strawberries, melons, blueberries...."

Honey bees are in trouble. Richard Bartz, Munich Makro Freak & Beemaster Hubert Seibring/Wikimedia Commons


Richard

 

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No Offense, American Bees, But Your Sperm Isn't Cutting It
By Ryan Bell/ Food for Thought/ The Salt: What's On Your Plate/ National Public Radio/ npr.org

"Editor's note: This story is for mature bees only.

Seducing a honeybee drone – one of the males in a colony whose only job is to mate with the queen – is not too difficult. They don't have stingers, so you just pick one up. Apply a little pressure to the abdomen and the drone gets randy, blood rushing to his endophallus, bringing him to climax.

"They're really accommodating," says Susan Cobey, a honeybee breeder on Whidbey Island, Wash. "One ejaculate is about 1 microliter, and it takes 10 microliters to artificially inseminate a queen."

Since 2008, Cobey has done her share of bee abdomen rubbing as part of a research team from Washington State University traveling through Europe and Asia. They've collected sperm from native honeybees in Italy, Slovenia, Germany, Kazakhstan and the Republic of Georgia – countries where honeybees have favorable genetic traits, like resistance to the varroa mite. The deadly parasite has been cited as a major factor in bee deaths, along with genetics, poor nutrition and pesticide exposure, according to a major report from the USDA and EPA in 2013.

Varroa mites are an invasive parasite from Asia that sucks hemolymph (bee blood) from adult and larval honeybees, weakening their immune systems and transmitting deadly pathogens, like bent wing virus. If left untreated, a varroa infestation can kill a colony in one year. First detected on U.S. soil in 1987, varroa has spread quickly, infesting upwards of 50 percent of American hives. Last year, 33 percent of U.S. honeybee hives died. That's troubling for the plight of honeybees and U.S. agriculture, which relies on pollinators to produce one-third of the food we eat...."

With an American honeybee queen for a mother and a European honeybee drone for a father, this worker bee has a level of genetic diversity unseen in the U.S. for decades. Researchers at Washington State University hope a deeper gene pool will give a new generation of honeybees much-needed genetic traits, like resistance to varroa mites. The parasite kills a third of American honeybees each year.

Megan Asche/Courtesy of Washington State University

Richard

 

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World Bee Collapse May Boil Down to a Vicious Mite and an Overlooked Idea
By Peter Hess/ Animals/ Biology & Diseases/ Science/ Environment/ Inverse/ inverse.com

""Now we understand why the pesticides the bees have been exposed to for decades are killing them."

The drastic decline in global honeybee populations is no secret. The phenomenon has been named “colony collapse syndrome,” and though it’s not clear what factors led up to it, entomologist Samuel Ramsey, Ph.D., explains that the culprits have been narrowed down to a triad of contributing factors: pesticides, poor nutrition, and parasites.

Out of these factors, he says, parasites hurt honeybee populations the most. And out of all the parasites, Ramsey shows in a new PNAS paper, the ominously named Varroa destructor is the very worst.

The varroa mite, a tiny parasitic arachnid that hitches a ride on honeybees and feeds on their innards, has menaced beekeepers for a long time. But for decades, they assumed it just sipped on bee blood (hemolymph) and spread diseases. The paper written by Ramsey and his colleagues reveals the varroa mite is far more dangerous. Rather than being one part of a dangerous triad of bee threats, parasites like the varroa mite might be at the top of a hierarchy.

“I was very excited, specifically because this is something they’ve believed about these arachnids for more than half a century now, and it’s gone unquestioned for years and years and years,” Ramsey, who worked on this research as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park and is the study’s first author, tells Inverse. He is now an entomologist at the Bee Research Laboratory with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.

The implications of the new paper for curbing colony collapse syndrome are profound. Not only does it explain why varroa mites are so deadly, but it also explains why pesticides and poor nutrition have seemed to play such a big role in bee population decline. But perhaps most importantly, it resurfaces a long-ignored scientist’s theory about the mites that might have helped us save the bees sooner....."

This low-temperature scanning electron microscope image shows a Varroa destructor mite attached to a honeybee.



Richard