Engineered symbionts activate honey bee immunity and limit pathogens | Hacker News Reader

Engineered symbionts activate honey bee immunity and limit pathogens

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60 pointsghostoftiber23 comments

As a beekeeper who loses half his hives every year, I can definitely say that Colony collapse is caused by varroa mites. You can easily see them on the bees. I have tried all kinds of treatments for varroa.I don't want to argue with those who are convinced that pesticides cause colony collapse, but I am certain, for me, it is varroa.

I am waiting for this treatment is available. I spend a thousands of dollars a year to restock my bees.

It's possible that pesticides and varrola mites are both causing it.

Could it be that the colony is less able to handle pressure from varroa because of other stresses, like pesticides? We use several methods in combination to deal with the varroa.

If a colony has too much after the winter we treat with ApiGuard, and the honey produced during the period is marked for winter feed. We do drone larvae cutting (not sure that is the terminology used) and treat with oxalic acid before the winter. We let them winter on at least 50% honey.

We have lost one colony in the last four winters, that was wintering on sugars alone. We overwinter three four colonies normally. So we are just hobbyists and our methods may not scale.

Some have argued that taking honey and replacing it with sugared water is bad for the bees immune system and general health. There was a very small scale study if you even can call it that, but I cannot find the article about it anymore.

Since taking honey hasn't been this deadly before, some form of infection seems plausible and the mites would fit here. As far as I know they are primarily feeding on fat reservoirs of bees. Are there any signs of varroa on the dead colonies?

> Some have argued that taking honey and replacing it with sugared water is bad for the bees immune system and general health

It'd be pretty hard to believe that it wasn't bad for the bees health.

The real question is how different is it from true nectar. They produce honey by preserving nectar in the first place. Of course even if they were given true nectar as a replacement directly (an ironic subversion of their job) it could theoretically cause issues from not being properly "preprocessed" or lacking the lead time to make a batch for their own consumption.

Just because sugar water isn't a good basis for humans doesn't neccessarily apply to bees - giving a cat a salad is not healthy for them and they will probably not be happy.

Honey contains lactic acid bacteria [1], which has proven to work as an antibiotic agent in scientific test[2]. Suger do not have that. Honey contains many other things, like pollen, that suger doesn’t.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S094450131...

[2] (In Swedish) https://kurera.se/mjolksyrabakterier-i-farsk-honung-kanske-m...

I am also a hobby beekeeper. My sample size is "2" - I always have two hives. I also had both hives die out last year after 3 years of not needing really any help at all. The one colony didn't really have any signs of mites to speak of. There were just a bunch of dead bees in the bottom of the box. The other colony absconded or was overrun. They had a decent-ish amount of stores they left out, but no bees whatsoever.

It's not just CCD that kills bees, other things happen which are very difficult to diagnose. That latter behavior also is what makes this really difficult, if there's no bodies to look at, it's really difficult to figure out what happened.

I am unconvinced. This explosion in varroosis is coinciding with an explosion in the application of pesticides all over the U.S. Use of pesticides has only increased with recent developments in gene editing. Do you know where your bees go? Do you know every plant from which they forage, and if its even safe for them to touch it?

There was an interesting HN thread a month ago about the problems the almond industry faced wrt bees. To me - a layman in bee-keeping - the article looked well-written and researched.

I particularly liked the paragraph on Solutions and the story of Glenn:

> Letting nature take its course is nothing new for 81-year old Glenn Anderson. He is the first and still one of the few organic almond growers in California’s San Joaquin Valley. His 40-year-old orchard is small – just 20 acres – and has always been chemical free.

> “We don’t have pests; we have biodiversity,” says Anderson

Apparently other bee keepers bring their hives to his plot of land to recuperate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22023578

Isn't this solved by a treatment with mushrooms, I heard Paul Stamets talking about this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TuL42bCIgp4

He’s finally bringing his bee medicine to market this year. In this video he says he has patents in the US, Eurasia, and several other countries, and he’s giving it away to the rest of the world. Pretty cool.

He’s uh...also making a cryptocurrency, so there’s that.

https://youtu.be/1Q0un2GPsSQ

Neonicotinoid pesticides are the likely culprit. Companies that produce them have been sinking large sums of money into studies that search for alternative explanations, and responses that don't simply consist of eliminating neonics.

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bees-insecticides-pestic...

France banned those pesticides more than a year ago, but their rates of colony collapse did not go down, if anything they went up.

So neonicotinoid pesticides are probably ruled out as the culprit.

The replacement is probably just as bad. I've seen industrial scale pesticide application in the U.S. Doesn't matter what you're spraying, it's going to cause Problems in the quantities that they use.

From listening to talks by Paul Stamets, it sounds like there might be a correlation between colony collapse disorder and lack of fungi / destruction of the old growth forest in a given area, a place where sensitive fungi can grow and thrive. Bees feed on mycellium/fungi, the fungi suppresses other bacteria, at least as far as I understand it. I wonder how much that's been tested by actual beekeepers.

Post a link?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32194-8

From the abstract: “Extracts from amadou (Fomes) and reishi (Ganoderma) fungi reduced the levels of honey bee deformed wing virus (DWV) and Lake Sinai virus (LSV) in a dose-dependent manner. In field trials, colonies fed Ganoderma resinaceum extract exhibited a 79-fold reduction in DWV and a 45,000-fold reduction in LSV compared to control colonies.”

Stamets has tons of talks on YouTube, a lot of them have the same content in them and anything after 2016 might have the bee story in it.

Looks like he plans to start selling these feeders this year, which is good news!

https://fungi.com/pages/bees

Stamets has been doing tests with beekeepers, having them give some of their hives sugar water with 1% (maybe lower) mycelium extract, which he says contains antiviral and antimicrobial properties. I think he’s testing extracts from a number of species too. Anyway, he says the results are great—IIRC none of the hives given extract collapsed.

That said, I haven’t heard anything about him bringing this to market, which is frustrating. I’d rather rely on strengthening an eons-old symbiosis than a newly-engineered bacteria. EDIT: see my other comment, this should be selling later this year,

Is this gene drives? Do inoculated bees behave differently or make a different honey? Does it only affect one species of bee? How many species are they going to test? Did they examine bees over the entire life cycle, or just adults? Does this bacteria occupy an existing niche?

They did not use gene drives. Also, no one uses gene drives in applications, except to study gene drives explicitly.

USE LESS PESTICIDES AND THE BEES WILL COME BACK FFS

Details here: https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bees-insecticides-pestic...

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