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Comment by kpgraham | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

> 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...

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

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?

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