It’s been a quieter week for bee news, which suits me fine at this end of the year. What did come through was worth reading though, and the first story is one every beekeeper in Britain should keep an eye on. Pour a brew. This one’s a bit grim before it gets cheerful.
Tropilaelaps: the mite researchers are worried about next
National Geographic has published a long piece by Sandy Ong on Tropilaelaps mites, often called tropi mites. They’re parasites of honey bees that come from Southeast Asia, where giant honey bees are thought to be their original hosts. Like varroa, they breed in sealed brood. Unlike varroa, they’re smaller, harder to spot and, by the estimates quoted in the article, they breed faster and mature quicker.
The bit that made me sit up is where they’ve been turning up. The article describes them spreading through Asia and the Middle East and, more recently, eastern Europe, with reports from Russia, Kazakhstan and Georgia. These aren’t warm places. For years the comforting line was that tropi mites couldn’t cope with a cold climate. That looks shaky now. Entomologists quoted in the piece fear it’s a matter of time before the mite reaches Western Europe.
Maggie Gill, who co-leads the Tropilaelaps task force at the international bee health group COLOSS, puts it plainly: “Varroa is damaging, but tropilaelaps is just more so.” The article explains that the mites’ feeding does more physical damage to developing bees, leaving them more open to viruses, and on Jeju Island in South Korea researchers have found tropi mites and varroa breeding in the same cell. That’s a nasty thought.
There’s some hope in there too. Sammy Ramsey’s team from the University of Colorado Boulder is trialling formic acid strips, a misted treatment and heat therapy on infested frames, and working towards a simple swab test so beekeepers can check a hive without killing bees. One catch the article mentions is that amitraz and the organic acid treatments we use for varroa don’t get through the wax cappings where tropi mites spend most of their lives.
So why does this matter in South Yorkshire? Because the lesson from varroa is that once a parasite like this gets established, you don’t get rid of it. In the UK Tropilaelaps is a notifiable pest, so if you ever suspect it you’re legally required to report it to the National Bee Unit. It’s also another good reason to think hard about where bees and queens come from before you buy them. Know what varroa looks like, look closely at your brood, and if something small and fast is scuttling across the comb that doesn’t look right, don’t shrug it off.
A detached sting is a tiny double-piston pump
On a lighter note, if you’ve ever been stung and wondered why the sting carries on doing its job after the bee’s gone, scientists in Australia have worked out how. The study, led by Fiorella Ramirez-Esquivel with colleagues from UNSW Canberra and Macquarie University, is published in PNAS and written up by StudyFinds.
Inside the venom bulb, which is less than a millimetre long, two barbed lancets slide back and forth. Each one carries a flexible valve. As the lancets move in opposite directions, one valve opens out like a little parachute and pushes venom towards the tip, while the other folds in and lets fresh venom refill behind it. No muscles work the valves. They change shape purely from the movement. In lab tests on ten stingers pushed into artificial tissue, strong pumping lasted anywhere from 15 to 70 seconds before tailing off into twitching.
The write-up is clear that this was done in artificial tissue with small samples, and any medical uses are a long way off. For the rest of us it’s just a marvellous bit of engineering. Mind you, I still won’t be admiring it next time one’s in my wrist.
Counting bees by their buzz
Over in the US, Laura Figueroa at UMass Amherst has built AI models that listen for bees. According to the university’s press release, one model picks up general bee activity from audio recordings and the other tells honey bees from bumblebees. They were trained on 594 recordings from 43 sites in the north-eastern US, collected over five years, and the release says they correctly identified 93 to 97 percent of bees in a sample.
The point is to cut down on lethal traps, which are often little more than coloured cups of soapy water and can kill a lot of bees. Figueroa says “there has to be a better way to monitor bee activity,” and she’s careful to call the tool something that sits alongside traditional methods rather than replacing them.
It’s research aimed at wild bee surveys more than hive management, but I like the idea. Most of us can tell a happy colony from an unhappy one by the sound when we lift the crownboard. It’s good to see that old instinct getting some proper science behind it.
That’s it for this week. If you’d like to see a colony up close next season and hear that buzz for yourself, have a look at our beekeeping experience sessions. I’ll happily talk mites with you for as long as you can stand it.