Lithium chloride kills a honey bee parasite by a systemic mode of action | Hacker News Reader

Lithium chloride kills a honey bee parasite by a systemic mode of action

nature.com

91 pointscurtis29 comments

While this is exciting, I can't help but notice-

Under the conditions of the common beekeeping practice in non-tropical regions, which are characterized by high colony densities, prevention of swarming and periodical mite control, it seems difficult to achieve a more balanced host-parasite relationship. Thus far, a long-term survival of A. mellifera colonies without any control measures is nearly exclusively reported from feral populations or colonies kept continuously under natural selection pressure

Varroa mites have evolved resistance to all available synthetic acaricides

In other words, this discovery is just another step following the footsteps of other failing herbicidal & insecticidal campaigns. Doing things nature's way is inconvenient, so we develop chemicals. But eventually, resistance is developed, and then we are in an arms race that will never end.

It would be nice to see more attention paid to the well-being of native pollinators, which already take care of themselves in regards to parasites & diseases, but whose numbers have been falling in recent years.

Managed honey bee colonies supplement the work of natural wild pollinators, not the other way around. In a study of 41 different crop systems worldwide, honeybees only increased yield in 14 percent of the crops. Who did all the pollination? Native bees and other insects.

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/youre-worrying-wrong-bees/

http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/10/native-bees-are-bett...

>It would be nice to see more attention paid to the well-being of native pollinators, which already take care of themselves in regards to parasites & diseases.

There's a second avenue which is the treatment-free solution practiced by some beekeepers. The idea there is to keep the selection pressure and just out-evolve the parasites. Given that managed bees reproduce much more often than natural populations there's a chance it might work and some encouraging results:

http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm

Thanks for that link, lots of interesting stuff on there.

For anyone interested, (one of?) the way that this selection pressure manifests is in grooming behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWMSIbeKoFQ The trade-off is less honey production and slower comb building.

Alive bees make more honey than dead ones though.

This is true but misses the point. Beekeeping is done for the sake of pollination: flowering fruit and crop pollination is where the money is at and the focus of the beekeeping industry. The vast majority of managed bee colonies in the US are used for this purpose. Bloom times are region and species specific. California almonds, for example, are usually the earliest bloom. Hives will be moved around based on those patterns. We're not talking 5, 20, or 100 hives, we're talking 10,000 to 250,000 hives at the high end. As blooms end the hives are moved to new orchards through out the growing season. Think bee hives on flat beds crisscrossing the country. At that scale replacing queens gets very expensive (and the hive may reject her anyway) due to veroa mite stress and the loss of the hive is common. Any honey not used by the bees along the way is sold to third parties which in turn sell it to consumers.

I think there's a consensus going for breeding bees for varroa sensitive hygiene/ mite resistance, but treatment free is excessive. You don't need to let the colony die when you're concerned with selecting for genetics. Just eliminate the drones and remove the queen next season.

I mean, you can always withhold treatment until mite counts indicate a problem. Letting mite populations explode can impact other colonies(domesticated & feral) in the area as well.

I imagine that the reason this isn't done is because it's not in the interest of Big Ag's medium-term profits.

Perhaps- native pollinators may be impacted simply by "big ag" techniques, pesticides, or fertilizers, in which case changing practice to care for them is surely seen as burdeonsome, annoying, and impacting profits.

Or, it may be that native pollinators are simply invisible. In other words, they won't know what they've got until it's gone.

Using wood bleach was certainly not a panacea, it will be another tool we use along with tossing in powdered sugar. We can cycle through the various treatments but it is a losing war. This may allow commercial beekeepers to start using lithium chloride or oxalic acid. We will see if it gets abused.

> This will allow commercial beekeepers to start using oxalic acid

The article talked about Lithium Chloride. Where do would bleach and oxalic acid come in?

Thanks, I reworded it it for clairity, on mobile :/

Where are they not allowed oxalic?

> Varroa mites have evolved resistance to all available synthetic acaricides

My understanding is that synthetics are a specific category of treatment. Oxalic doesn’t fall into that group and I don’t think lithium chloride would either, but someone more expert may have a better idea.

All of life and evolution is a never ending arms race. I don't see what the problem is in applying human intelligence to that arms race. An important part of being human involves using our intelligence to manipulate nature in a way that is beneficial to us. If lithium chloride helps us with the goal of healthier honey bees by decreasing parasites, we should do it. We should also be researching and thinking of what to do if/when resistance evolves in the parasite. But, just because resistance can evolve, doesn't mean we despair of using chemicals to fight parasites.

Saying we need to keep fighting does not mean we need to fight as stupidly as possible.

With care we can prevent antibiotic resistance becoming significant for decades, or we can get it to show up in the first week an antibiotic is introduced. While parasites are slower to develop resistance we still face similar issues with Lice and other pests and we really should consider both the short and long term impacts of any approach which is directly fighting evolution.

This is great news, but I have a few questions that weren't covered in the article:

1. How long-lasting is the effect? How long does the LiCl stay "active"? Will bees need to be fed this at a regular cadence to keep them mite free?

2. Is there any evidence on whether or not the LiCl makes its way into the honey produced by treated bees? LiCl can affect the nervous system (although this is an extremely low quantity). I'm just wondering if there is someone who eats a LOT of honey, could they be impacted (similar to those people who reportedly got mercury poisoning from eating too much fish)

I know very little about the biological mechanisms at work here, but those were two thoughts that immediately came to mind.

1. How long-lasting is the effect? How long does the LiCl stay "active"? Will bees need to be fed this at a regular cadence to keep them mite free?

The paper says that a single feeding achieved good results, though worse than continued feeding spanning a few days. It seems then that a single treatment will only kill mites that are already in the hive, but will not do anything to help develop immunity. Looks like bee keepers will just have to add lithium compounds to the list of treatments they already regularly apply.

2. Is there any evidence on whether or not the LiCl makes its way into the honey produced by treated bees?

The paper mentions that it doesn’t accumulate in bees wax, though it says nothing about the honey. They discuss potential toxicity though, and it seems that lithium is not toxic to mammals in concentrations relevant here. Certainly there is no bioaccumulation effect here that makes eating fish somewhat dangerous.

Only doing a single feeding seems like a great way to breed resistance in the mites.

Broodless bees don’t need treating for long with most treatments - it’s the brood that’s hard to hit. That said, avoiding resistance is important.

I would guess that a small amount would get in the honey the bees were making at that time, but beekeepers would not harvest that honey. When many flowers are blooming, a second box is added to the hive just for honey( a super). At this time the beekeeper does no additional feeding.

Most treatment see the honey supers removed to avoid contamination. There are a few exception which don’t require this, like oxalic acid.

When the honey flow starts, you need to add boxes fast - I’m up to 7 and 2 of those have been removed, extracted and put back on.

Where are your bees? I am just getting started in South Florida.

New Zealand - quite possibly a better bit of the season here!

If this is true in real trials, it is a big thing. Varroa mites have developed resistance to fluvalvinate, which is most commonly used miticide and formic acid is really easy to overdose. Lithium cloride in those quantities is quite safe and low cost. Even more, with short treatment duration (48h at 25mM concentration) one can time the treatment well to reduce LiCl ending up in the honey.

Broodless bees are worth treating and it provides a great knockdown at a time varroa are vulnerable. But bees aren’t broodless most the time or necessarily any of the time. It’s far harder to treat brood and that’s the key area as it’s where the varroa are.

> From these data, we concluded that LiCl, not RNA knockdown, mediated the observed activity on Varroa mites and that it would be worthwhile to analyse the potential of LiCl as a varroacide.

Interesting how correlation doesn't mean causation :).

One idea is to engineer micro robots with similar size and use image recognition to find these mites near nests and they go in and kick ass. Like how a few hornets can take care of thousands of bees. This is a future todo

Not robotic, but a similar hunt/kill strategy is is being tried here with a relative of the scorpion. They coexist with bees and and eat varroa. Plenty of discussion happing among the bee geeks. https://www.nzbees.net/forums/topic/1465-beekeeping-and-the-...

Hopefully this discovery will help solve the colony collapse problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com