Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

blooalien

Some potentially seriously good news there if it all pans out the way it sounds like it might. Fingers crossed for the bees!

roboben

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.

shevy-java

Still the honeybees keep on dying ... Perhaps it is time to stop blaming the mites for the decline of the honeybees.

aussieguy1234

So what's it going to do to the honey? Will we have spider venom laced honey?

schainks

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.

tamimio

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!

Coneylake

Another terrible MCU spin-off

tomaytotomato

Check out Paul Stamets' research using Mycelium to give honeybees an immuneboost. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32194-8

benbojangles

One day bees will evolve to produce spider venom

onesandofgrain

How did they screen for this venom?

Luckyemmet

Genuinely thought this was a new marvel character lol

chasil

Powdered sugar is the standard treatment for removing varroa mites that have emerged from capped cells. "The peptides killed only the mites, while the bees survived." What benefits do these new treatments offer? They certainly won't be cheaper. https://www.honeybeesuite.com/can-powdered-sugar-control-var... Edit: "Treatments every week killed more mites than treatments every two weeks, which killed more mites than treatments every month... The only treatment schedule that effectively suppressed mites over long periods was once per week... sugar dusting has been found to significantly reduce adult mite populations at times when little brood is present."

mjanx123

IIRC the Asian honey bee is more resilient to mites

worldvoyageur

I grew up on a farm on which the apiary and all connected with it was a major part of the farm's output. Honey, beeswax, nukes (a queen and 10K or so worker bees as a starter colony, sold to other apiaries in the spring if they'd had too many winter losses), fertilizing services (drop a couple colonies off at a berry farm after dark, pick the colonies up two weeks later, profit!) and other products. It's been over ten years since I spent any serious time with bees, but the bees themselves did a great job on the varroa mites. Sentinel bees at the hive entrance would pick the mites off the incoming bees. The problem was if the colony had a solid floor the mites would just climb back onto the next bee that passed nearby. If the solid colony floor was replaced with a mesh, the mites would fall through to the ground below while the bees could still go about their business. We would still sometimes treat for varroa, but making it easier for the bees to handle varroa how they had evolved to was the first line of defence. This was Canada, regular Italian bees, hard winter kills of whatever wasn't properly winterized.

skeeter2020

we're going to need a lot of very tiny syringes and band-aids!

eleveriven

Spider venom saving bees was not on my bingo card, but this is genuinely cool. Obviously "works on mites in the lab" is a long way from "works safely and cheaply in a real hive", but varroa is such a nasty problem that even a new direction is worth paying attention to