In the past years, I’ve often thought that many problems would at least be smaller if people had more knowledge, more education. I don’t mean years at school. It’s more the capacity of critical thinking, of common sense that I miss. Or recognizing that things are a little bit more complex than the black or…
When it comes to varroa treatments, there’s apparently a gap between theory and practice. A sentence I often hear: “When will scientists finally find something against varroa mites?”. It seems that the available products aren’t seen as “something against the mite”. I always thought that this was because of the belief that there should be…
Oxalic acid treatments against varroa mites are both efficient against the parasite as well safe for the bee colonies. Efficiency and safety – those are the most important criteria for a bee health product. Or for any drug in veterinary of human use, for that matter. Oxalic acid was used in Asia and Eastern Europe…
Honey bee viruses didn’t seem to be a major issue for a long time. At least, they weren’t in the focus of beekeepers – and not that many bee scientists either. This changed quite a bit: first, the varroa mite transmitted the Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) leading to one of the most prominent symptoms of…
The finding that engineered bacteria could help against varroa and the Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) made a big buzz. These bacteria, Snodgrassella alvi, live naturally in the bee gut. Leonard et al. modified them to produce double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), which should interfere with crucial viral and varroa genes. Sounds crazy. But let’s go step by…
Varroa treatments arrived in crime. In a double sense, just bear with me for a while. In a crime series I watched some days ago, the victim was a beekeeper killed while working on his colonies. Beekeeping became so popular in the past years that I see quite a lot of magazines, TV shows, social…
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