Failure to Select: The Cause of Weakness in Bees

This page contains a series of musings, mostly culled from posts to discussion lists.  Those at the top are newest.

Wednesday 25th June 2009 07.41

Another angle on the causes of ill-health in bees.  The rise of larger-scale 'bee-farming' centered on pollination services has given rise to a small but powerful lobby capable of setting the strategic agenda.  It demands fast solutions, which the pharmaceutical industries are happy to supply, while suppressing the voices calling for more deep rooted changes leading to longer lasting solutions.  Bee 'farming' has resulted in short-term exploiters gaining the upper hand over traditional, principled beekeeping practices that seek to work with nature.  'Bee farmers' are able to present themselves, their clients, and their support services as superior stakeholders, their needs of urgent national importance.  

It is their agenda that has shaped the March 2009 Defra report Healthy Bees: protecting and improving the health of honeybees in England and Wales.  http://www.defra.gov.uk/hort/Bees/news/plan.pdf.  A more irony-rich, misconceived and miserably unscientific document is hard to imagine.  It repeatedly mouths 'the importance of good husbandry' while utterly ignoring the precepts of good breeding.  It sees no contradiction at all in repeatedly stating that policies are to be based on 'sound science', whilst recommending compulsory strategies that fly directly in the face of the most fundamental tenets of unequivocally established Evolutionary Theory - the deepest possible scientific analysis of the factors impacting on health in living organisms. 

The strategies in place don't just make no sense, they absolutely assure the continuation of sick bees.  

 Friday June 5th 2009 06.20 pm  

'Putting the Boot on the Right Foot...'

Taken from Glenn Apiaries, bee breeders:

"Given enough time and in the absence of chemical treatment, European bees would probably become adapted to Varroa by natural selection, as the Asian honeybee has. [1] The goal of the bee breeder is to accelerate this process through artificial selection. [2] 

This is done by identifying the bees with the desired characteristics and controlling their mating to accumulate these traits in a "closed population." Closed population breeding programs have long been used with great success in the breeding of dogs, cattle, and other livestock. It has only been relatively recently that the mating biology, genetics, and techniques in artificial (instrumental) insemination of bees have been worked out so as to make possible, sustainable closed population breeding programs. [3]

Research in the last few years has shown that Varroa resistant traits also exist in European bees. Through selective breeding, hygienic behavior and SMR have now been developed to the point of being in practical use by beekeepers. Today it's encouraging to hear more and more reports of beekeepers able to return to beekeeping without the use of chemicals."

  http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/breeding.html 

Comments:

[1] This is perfectly accurate as far as it goes. The problem not mentioned is that of defending the offspring of your resistant bees against the dilution of their genes by non-resistant stock. And the selection process can never be as thoroughgoing as that used by nature.

[2] The 'process' that could be 'accelerated' is that of locating resistant stock - something that happens much more effectively - and much more naturally - in nature. 

_But any claim that there is an 'acceleration' in the adaptation in the broad population is false._

The broad population can only gain resistance through the reduction of the disruption caused by medication. The problem is not the lack of adapted bees; its the massive load of unadapted strains that should have been allowed to die naturally. Until they go the problem stays.  This is the bit to stay focused on. 

[3a] 'Closed' breeding is only in play here in the confines of the breeder's apiary.  As soon as the queens leave, the purity of strain lasts only as long as she lives.  Her offspring will likely mate with unadapted drones, and the beekeeper is halfway back to where he started.   

[3b] 'Instrumental' breeding (artificial insemination) removes the mechanism of natural selection of healthy fathers by cutting out the competitive element of wing mating.  

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Friday June 5th 2009 04.20 pm

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Thursday June 4th, 2009 7.40 am

Recent thinking has led to the notion that there are two essential discussions that should be had:

The first would try to discover how the various industry stakeholders regard the feral population.  The second seeks to ask how important the feral population is - both to the industry and also to the wider wild habitat.

These questions address a guiding fear: that among the powers that be there is a lobby that would be happy to fully domesticate the bee. The vision of a well-bred, reliable, productive and docile animal, that, GM style, cannot exist without the continuous guiding hand of the bee farmer, seems to be the aim of much research and discussion.  There seems to be little room in this vision for wild colonies.  

Just as the first discussion would establish the industry stake-holder's positions; the second would seek to establish the range of views held by conservation bodies about wild bees.  This would ask whether the aims of the former group conflict with those of the latter.    

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Wed Jun 03, 2009 12.14 pm

Subject: Lack of protection for the Wild Honeybee.

It is becoming ever clearer to me that the great bulk of beekeepers, the support industries, breeders, magazines, and their clients, the farmers seeking pollination services, and the supermarkets wanting hive products, are solely interested in beekeeping.  Their concern for the wellbeing of the honeybee is secondary to their concern for their means of income.  

These are the stakeholders, who government bodies, overseen by Defra, approach for consultation, and who lobby for policies that suit their agendas.  Funding for research is geared to their needs.

The feral population has no representative whatsoever.  Those bodies and organisations concerned with conservation, ecology and biodiversity, seem to assume that the government is doing all that can be done for the Honeybee.  they seem to entirely fails to realise that the aim there is simply the maintenance of a viable farm animal.  Regulatory policies are entirely geared to effective medication; and the feral population is, if considered at all, regarded as a nuisance.

The wild Honeybee has no protection.  And the actions of the industry, supported by the regulators, ensure it no means of recovery.  For want of protection, the wild Honeybee is being slowly destroyed by the hive products industries.

This must be wrong; and it could easily be righted.  The Honeybee could, for example, be added to the threatened species list.  Interference with wild colonies could be forbidden.  SSSIs could be made protected areas.  The Forestry Commission could be charged with ensuring nesting habitat, and planting to aid wild Honeybees.

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Wed Jun 03, 2009 6:38 am    

Post subject: The problems of re-establishing a Feral Population

I've been trying to put myself in the position of a professional breeder. My aim would be to breed resistant bees, but would I want those bees to became naturalised, established? That would be losing me business. Doesn't it suit professional breeders to have a suppressed or non-existent feral population? Perhaps I'm too cynical, but I like to try to understand all the angles.

More importantly, the difficulty from our point of view (I'm speaking of the UK now) is how to allow a feral population to re-establish itself, against the constant tide of unadapted genes and vigourous diseases from domestic hives and bee farmers. Breeding, or locating resistant stock is one thing, allowing it to become established another thing entirely. I can't see a way out except through either banning medication across the board, or arranging pockets, oasis of freedom from intrusion. Protected areas seem appropriate. I think medicated stocks should be banned from our 'Sites of Special Scientific Interest' (SSSI) - which covers a useful amount of the rural landscape. It won't happen until enough people understand that left to themselves wild animals sort out their own health problems.

I think I'm most worried by the idea that it suits too many businesses to have no wild bees, and a controlled man-dependent domestic bee that relies on medication and/or manipulation to survive. These are the 'stakeholders' whose views drive policymaking.

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Mon Jun 01, 2009 9:46 pm    

(Addressing claims that 'natural' treatments like sugar dusting are not harmful in the way 'chemical' treatments might be thought to be)

How do you draw the line between one kind of interference and another in terms of 'natural'? How, in other words, do you demarcate 'natural' from 'unnatural' treatments?

If apistan is 'unnatural', then is formic acid? Oxalic acid? Why?

Is it purely a 'mechanical' demarcation?

What if you stopped each bee at the hive entrance and personally picked off every mite? That would be mechanical. Would that be 'natural' in your book?

Suppose I invent a little mechanical vacuum/brushing machine that sits in the hive entrance. Is that 'natural'

Can you really not see that all these methods are utterly unnatural because they frustrate Nature's system of adapting to new predators? The offspring that are children from such treated colonies, whether through swarms or fertilisation by drones, are no less dependent upon the cleaning regimes than their parents.

That means that if they go into the wild they will not survive. If your drones fertilise wild queens, their inadequate genes will supply their inadequate behavioural traits to the resulting colonies - which might have been precious resistant bees - making them as vulnerable to the mite - as your are. They will die.

The reasoning here is straightforward. If you think it is wrong, show where it goes wrong.

The only fully 'natural' method is Natural Selection.

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Last updated: July 02, 2009.    ( 27th May 09)