The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - You can rear varroa resistant bees IAW Dr. Melissa Oddie, Interview

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Interview:  https://youtu.be/8nzquEpoJW0

So hello and welcome to another episode of interviews with experts. Today, my very special guest is Dr. Melissa Audie. Melissa has spent the last 10 years researching honeybee resistances to the invasive parasite, Varroa Destructor. She works directly with beekeepers in Norway and around the world to improve breeding efforts. Now she's writing everything down in a book titled Resisting Verroa. What do you do with colonies that don't demonstrate adequate levels of sensitivity and uncapping activity? Is the developing bee removed from its cell, or do the mites just expire when uncapped?

What should backyard beekeepers be doing in order to select bee stock where we keep bees? Let's find out together. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is The Way to Bee. So thank you everybody for joining us. I'd like to welcome Dr. Melissa Adi here to talk about her current research and an upcoming book that's coming out. So if you would, please just introduce yourself, tell us where you are and what you do. Right. So, yeah, I have been working on honeybees probably for the last 10 years. I started during my PhD, which was in Switzerland, but I was working on a population of honeybees in Norway.

And specifically they sent me up there because this group of honeybees that had been reared by a beekeeper in Norway had been reared without any sort of mite treatments. And this was from 1998 until about 2014-15 when I got there. And he had pretty much a commercial operation of about 400 hives. And they were completely treatment-free and doing very well, producing, you know, regular amounts of honey, and he was not just not using any sort of might control, not even drone cutting on them. So they sent me up there saying, figure out how this is happening. So I did basically, ran a bunch of tests. We looked at hygienic behaviors and we did some virus work.

And we found that they had elevated rates of a behavior that I called recapping, cell recapping, which was the honeybees would open the cell caps. they would leave the brood in there. They wouldn't remove the brood to disrupt the mite reproductive cycle, and they would cap it back over. I didn't find high levels of brood removal, which is interesting because brood removal has been found in most other populations of resistance bee.

So that was my PhD, finding out how they were doing that. And then I got to do a postdoc in Sweden on the bond bees. I'm not sure how much you know about the bond bees, but it was a Swedish stock that was left on an island, usually to its own devices, and it developed resistances as well. It was one of the first scientifically reported populations to have done this. So I got to work on the bond bees and see how they differed from the Norwegian bees. And after the postdoc, I was head hunted by a group in Norway who got funding to do a Veroa project

based on the original work that I had done with this beekeeper in Norway. So I was put in charge of a breeding program. We ran that for about four and a half years. And that's where we are now. So the breeding program is still going. And I'm still kind of receiving data from the beekeepers. And we're just basically recreating the methods that the original beekeeper did and we're just replicating it with another population.

And it's going, results for now are pretty interesting. And so if we go into your background a little bit, bit. What would have drawn you to this particular area of research over any other animal or any other species on earth that might have had your interest? How did you, what was your path academically? And then who influenced you along the way and maybe exposed you to this? Okay. I mean, we can start at the very, very beginning. When I was in kindergarten, we had a field trip to it was it was kind of like a honey museum where they had bees and stuff and I was completely enthralled from day one I just absolutely they had an observation hive in there and I remember this

that I was glued to this observation hive even when you know there were other activities going on and stuff and there's a guy who came out with a drone in his hand he's like who wants to hold a bee and everyone was like my hand shot up was like me I want to do it um so I've always loved insects and bees specifically. And, you know, when I was going through school, I basically wanted to be a conservation biologist. I wanted to work on big problems. I wanted to work on invasive species and basically solve these, these global challenges. That's what I wanted to do. So through my university, you know, I did the zoology degree and, you know, how to focus on conservation. I went to Exeter University in England for my master's. And that's when I

met some of the researchers working on the varroa problem and I got to know about these these bees that were developing natural resistances to this you know global parasite problem and I was like yeah that I wanted do that so I sent a printed resume in an envelope to a professor in in Switzerland saying now I you have a bee lab this is what I want to work on do you have a place for me And he got back to me by email. He said, yeah, actually, come on over. We can get some funding for you to do a PhD here. That was easy.

So, yeah. And, you know, I mean, insects are so fascinating. And I think they're really underrated taxa to work on because they are everywhere. They do everything. They're ecological drivers. They're so important, you know, even though they look kind of icky and gross. But they are really just a core part of our Earth's biology. And they're just so interesting.

Now, would you have considered yourself a student activist? Like in high school, did you put up posters? Did you have a conservation effort going on, grassroots? Or did you try to push back against pesticides and insecticides? What were you like growing up? So in high school, there wasn't a lot of talk about. We actually didn't have a very strong biology program, which I really regret. I think I started in college.

So Sejeep, we have this kind of interim between high school and university called Sejep in Montreal, where I grew up. And I met some really interesting teachers there who had more insight on these topics. And I'm also a bit of an artist. So I used my art skills to design campus posters on anti-littering and sustainability and stuff like that. That's where I started. And then in university, I joined, you know, as a volunteer on conservation programs. I got to go out into Ontario and help tag turtles and toads and, you know, get to know the conservation issues there in Canada. And I also got a chance to go out to Madagascar and do some real species or biodiversity surveys, which was absolutely fascinating.

What species of turtle are we talking about? So were you out there with a herpetologist? Who was doing that study? Yeah, so there was a turtle monitoring program in Ontario. There is an interesting kind of underground market for turtle soup. So they were catching turtles to eat them. And there was also the pet trade going on. We had some pretty endangered species.

And of course, you have overpopulation of nests predators, the raccoons basically, mostly. But it was from the lack of predators, the lack of wolves and coyotes to control those in a lot of areas where people like to be. So the raccoons just kind of get out of hand. So you get something called ghost populations of turtles where you see adults, you see individuals, but they're so long-lived. So it looks like the population is fine,

but actually there's almost no recruitment because there's so many nest predators that they just get all of the eggs before they can hatch. And they get the babies too. So there was a hatching program attached where we would hatch the eggs and then return them to where we found the nests and give them a bit of a head start.

But yeah, so that's just one of the many kind of just small conservation issues that are in and around where people live that they may not be aware of. Everything we do has an impact. Oh, absolutely. And back to the turtles, when it comes to nesting or hatching those eggs, does temperature play in the gender of that emerging? Yeah, yeah, it does. I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember which way it goes, whether it's,

warm for females, cold for males, or vice versa. I think it also changes with the species of reptile as well. So some, you know, some sex determination is flipped based on temperature. But yes, that is, that does happen. So with climate change, we are getting a bit of a population bias in some species of turtle, where we're getting more recruitment of one gender over the other, which is causing problems as well. Wow. That's very interesting. Again, everything has an impact. Yeah. And you mentioned toads as well. Yeah, it did a little bit of Fowler's Toad's work. We were pit tagging Fowler's Toads. It's a threatened species on the beaches there of the lakes we were working around. Can you explain how a toad survives winter, an adult toad? Don't they dig in and like almost freeze and encapsulate themselves underground? Pretty much. They go into hibernation pretty much is what what it is. And turtles too, they bury under the mud and they go into a state of torpor where they slow their heart.

heartbeat down, slow their circulation down, and just go to sleep until the weather warms up. And so then, and yeah, you probably became aware of so many species that were threatened or endangered. And when you got into the insect kingdom rate, we're losing so many species. People focus on the honeybee, which is, of course, what we're talking about today. Yeah. But there are profound, there's an extinction going on when it comes to insects. Can you explain a little bit about that and why that just? should even be a concern to us?

Where that comes from is a paper that was published, I think, from a study done in Germany where they looked at four major sites and they had historical data where they tracked the abundance of flying insects and stuff. It was quite an isolated study, but it did kind of paint a broader picture as to what was happening. And basically the amount of flying insects that they caught from 20 years ago versus today was a lot less. You know, and other stories have, you know, have replicated this as well.

So, and, you know, it's not just insects. It's farm birds. It's, you know, megafauna. It's pretty much everything. And it's directly related to the amount of natural habitat we permit to be in, in our space. So, you know, habitat is being reduced at a rate of knots for, you know, housing, for urban development, for agriculture. and the loss of species is directly related to that.

And then so that leads us to what some people, this is very interesting to me because when I talk with researchers and ecology-minded people forest ecology and things like that, they're not actually that keen about the honeybee because it's not a native bee here. It's not. How do you interact with, you must come across other researchers who are like, yeah, the honeybee doesn't even belong here. they're impacting our native species. What's your elevator pitch to those people regarding why the honeybee became your focal point? Well, it's interesting. And honestly, I've had this conversation a lot recently because before I left Norway, we started a project where we basically wanted to bring beekeepers into the fold of

wild pollinator conservation because they have the common goal of wanting to preserve natural habitat. Honeybees rely on flower diversity. they rely on, you know, just reduced use of pesticides in specific areas where they can forage and stuff. There's a lot of common ground between beekeepers and wild pollinator conservationists. And I think that splitting that really weakens the fight to preserve needed ecosystems, which benefits everything, right? So, you know, that is my pitch, is that we have beekeepers and most of them are really aware of what's going on because their animals deal directly with the threats that affect wild pollinators, too.

So a lot of them are actually, you know, willing to help and willing to take the initiative. They know a lot more than the average person on these issues and stuff. So I think they're creating a unified force between beekeepers and, you know, pollinator conservationists and wildlife conservationists general. I think that's probably the way forward because here we have advocates in an industry that, you know, maybe the government might listen to a bit more because you have something that is making. money that is, you know, directly suffering from the actions of the rest of the agricultural industry as well. So it gives us a lot more arguing power when you say, hey, you know, we actually have a

bunch of people whose livelihoods are on the line. You know, it's not just wild pollinators. It's people, too. And, you know, everyone suffers when we have biodiversity loss, when we have, you know, natural habitat loss. But it's much easier to see, I think, when you have a beekeeper who comes to the government is like, hey, I lost 80% of my husband. And it's like, hey, I lost 80% of my hives this year. What? You know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and as of today, by the way, Project APSM just published their findings, 1.6 million colonies lost in the United States. That's today. That's hot off the press. Yeah. And then, of course, though, there seems to, in this country, at least, there's a pretty strong divide. They just look at that as big agriculture and these are

commercial people and they don't care about our environment and they're not causing this impact where we could activate the population base of the United States to look more carefully at our environment. People kind of feel like they're not very empowered to help influence the way we're managing agricultural lands here in the United States. Is it different for you there? What initiatives are there to help maybe boost the environment a little bit for all of the pollinators. Not enough, I think, and pretty much that's the answer for every country, you might say, is not enough.

So there's this disconnect. People don't really understand or don't want to understand the power that actually ecosystem services and natural habitat actually has on benefiting agriculture and benefiting people in general. They see the production numbers and they equate, you know, square footage of area to, you know, production numbers. But, you know, you don't realize that if you actually have some of that square footage as natural space or, you know, you have intercropping or you have, you know, plant diversity

adjacent to your crops or even within your crops, that actually lends, you know, power to the natural species coming in. And, you know, it helps for pest control. It helps for pollination. it generally helps to keep things in balance where we have these massive monoculture crops and we have to actively manage them because we have pest outbreaks because everything is the same. So anything that predates the plant

that you're trying to grow just kind of explodes. And, you know, when we try and manage that with pesticides with herbicides and fertilizers and stuff, you know, it impacts everything else around it. And taking that out, you know, impacts everyone else. You know, you're the honeybees and the wild pollinators and that stuff. So I think finding a way to incorporate natural diversity in agriculture and, you know,

seeding a little bit of acreage to natural space to incorporate it is probably the best way forward. Because if we don't figure out how to do this, you know, these types of losses that we're seeing, they're going to keep happening. Is, are there gains being made? Is it happening? or are we going the other way? It's more and more land being committed to monocultural practices, or are we actually inching our way back to a more percentage of natural or fallow ground

that could just be left for nature? So both fronts, I think. There are people who are really progressive and trying to find ways to do this. There are a lot of organic farmers that are testing methods and stuff. But we have this stigma that these types of methods, are not as productive. And, you know, a lot of the times that is true. But if you're looking at the grand scheme of things, you know, how productive are you going

to be if 80% of your bees die every year and you don't have the pollination strength to actually get all of your monocultures pollinated? Right. You know, because this is what we're facing right now. It's like, okay, we don't have any wild pollinators left. We just need to buy bees. Oh, there are no more bees. Oh.

Yeah. This is where it's going. So, you know, what is more profitable? in the long run. Yeah. And we frequently see posts, you know, where, you know, those native bees, they just outperform honeybees anyway. Like if we look at Mason bees or the Blue Orchard Bee or Apis Melissa D's,

they just, they outdo the honeybee. Sure, one to one, but the honeybee colony, if we send out thousands to do that work. So they do, I think University of Vermont did that study where they show the deformed wing virus was being spread. from commercial apiaries to adjacent floral sources that were being used. Specifically, I believe it was the bumblebee that was also getting then the deformed wing virus. What can you tell us about how our honeybees managed or not are kind of impacting the native bee

potential for disease spread? Right. So my knowledge is probably going to be dated by at least six months. I'm not sure of the brand new papers that have come out, But the last I checked, we found traces of deformed wing virus in bumblebees, but none of it, as I understand, was replicating, which means that the virus was in the environment, but it wasn't affecting, it wasn't infecting other species that we know of. Now, that being said, when you have a virus in a system with species that are similar to the thing that can contract the virus, you get something called a zoo. We're very familiar with this with COVID and the avian flu virus and stuff. We've seen it.

These things can jump species when and how this happens, completely unpredictable. But the more viruses in the system, the more likely you will have a jump. So although the threat seems to be relatively low now, we can't say that there won't be a threat in the future, a larger threat. And we don't know how that will impact wild species. So it's a danger, definitely. So just to clear this up for the lay person that's listening and their brain is just exploding, you're saying that like a honeybee has deforming virus that lands on a flower and it leaves some of that residue there.

And then a bumblebee comes along and gets it, that individual bumblebee may demonstrate. Well, it doesn't happen. If the virus, you know, it changes in, say again. the deformed wing virus that wouldn't manifest itself in an adult, right? Oh, it does. It does? So its wings could actually begin to deteriorate. Well, that's the interesting thing.

So the deformed wings of the deformed, you know, what it's named for, that is a chance symptom when the bee is affected during development. But that is not the only symptom of deformed wing virus. Oh, great. You know, you get a shortened lifespan. It's, you know, it's basically, it's just bad. So, you know, if the bumblebee, if it ends up being able to jump in and the bumblebee contracts it, it will bring it back to its nest. And, you know, it probably infect the brood there, you know, where it can do a lot more damage.

I wonder if that benefits the bumblebee that they don't, you know, they start a new nest every year. If that keeps them somewhat protected from spreading, where if we have a perennial nest like with the honeybee, once they start to build any kind of viral load, it continues to build where these others are starting new nests every spring. It's possible. It will depend entirely on the health of the queen because the risk of that strategy is you only have one individual starting the nest. So if she's sick, you know, it could lead to really bad things. You are not giving us happy things here, Melissa. This is all potential. And, you know, we have the power to change this. And, you know, higher diversity actually creates, you know, more dispersion ability and less competition.

So you have less of this niche overlap with these different species as well. And so now we get into how colonies protect themselves and onto the studies in the paper that you published. The one I looked up was published on April 28th of 2021. Is that the newest for you? It's one of the newest that I think I am a first author on. There's a few others. stuff. I've got another one that's in review or going to be soon. People are citing your research all over the place, I noticed. So like 700. I hope so. Yeah, well, that's what you want, right? That's the point.

I hope so. That's why you're here. That's where you're here. Okay. So let's talk about this hygienic behavior, this uncapping and capping, does this fall under the VSH category of B or what do you call this? Right. So the original researchers who actually, you know, found this behavior, they did tie it into Verroa sensitive hygiene. And what it is is part of a repertoire of general hygienic behaviors. If there's something wrong with the brood in the cell, the bees will uncap it to just check out what's going on. And whether the brood is sick or dying, whether it needs to be removed or not. This is a general health check that all bee colonies have to deal with pathogens in their hive. You know, They've had it. They've had it forever. What we have seen with Varroa is that a lot of these hygienic

behaviors have now been co-opted and the bees get triggered to perform these behaviors more on cells that have been infested with Varroa. And like I said, the majority of the populations that we know of that have resistances to Varroa, they rely on brood removal. So they take the brood full out. They stop the reproductive cycle of the mite and she only gets on average about three. So that has a big impact on Varroa reproduction. Now, the interesting thing is that I didn't see vera or brood removal in these Norwegian bees. I have a theory on that, which is unproven, but I can say it anyway. And that, you know, if you have a bee colony in maybe a more northern area,

suddenly the winter bees become a lot more important because they have to survive until spring. They have to survive probably a lot longer. So then removing the brood of these winter bees, which you get a finite, amount of before winter sets in might actually be a higher energetic cost than, you know, the varroa, you know, being there. So if you can reduce the varroa population not a lot, but enough to keep your winter bees healthy enough that they survive, you know, till the next spring, then recapping may be sufficient, may reduce the varroa reproduction enough that, you know, you don't need to start removing bees.

But it could also be time-based. They could also change their strategy based on the number of resources they have. I did this study one year for a set period in August. It could be that they weren't recapping at that time or removing brood at that time and just recapping, but they could be removing brood at another time as well.

But these were bees that also had the selection pressure of commercial viability as well. So they had to be big, they had to be gentle, they had to produce a lot of honey. So those were selection pressures acting on the population as well as varroa control. Now, finding colonies that actively uncap and recap and sometimes because I like to look at the landing board, especially this time of year. We have snow coming up Monday, by the way.

I don't know what your weather's like where you are. Probably the same. I go out at sunrise to see if they've pulled pupa out and I look at those. They could be at the purple eye face and things like that. I never find mites on them, but I don't. I'm assuming that if there were mites in that cell when they pulled it out, I also look for deformed wing virus on those. But when they pull them out, where does the mite go?

Do they take off? The Foundress mite is the only one that doesn't die, right? Yeah. And you said she has three reproductive cycles. On average. On average. So, you know, it could be between one to usually five or six maybe maximum, but it's about three usually.

Okay. And when they come out, so let's say she's disrupted, the Founder Smite comes out. and her offspring die from desiccation or whatever happens to them. Where does she go? Does she immediately seek another, you know, pupa state cell to go into? Or does she hunt around on the surface for a while or attach herself to a nurse? Where does she go?

She probably tries to get onto another bee as quickly as possible. So they are, they know, they smell exactly like the colony, but they're not altogether invisible. And honeybees are pretty meticulous. I think if you put a varomite on a comb, I think they generally get pretty nervous until they jump back on a B and they can hide. So how long she stays on a nurse,

I think it really depends on when the reproductive cycle was interrupted. The mites kind of have to reset because their physiology tends to change when they go into open position mode, when they go into egg laying mode. So that changes back and the cycle needs to restart again. I know what I want you to talk about.

because it's really weird. The male mite. Often in social media, people put these little photos up here. Oh, that's a male Varroa mite. Well, not if it's out clamoring around on your comb. It isn't. What happens? Because they go through this change where their reproductive system

is actually part of their mouth. Is that right? I have not heard of that. Not for these mites, no. For the Varroa destructor might, what happens to the male and why does the male never leave the cell? So they have this interesting system,

which only a few, a number of a carids have, a number of mites have. They've got what's called a sib mating system. So if they're in kind of an enclosed space or something where they can't travel freely about, basically the male mites are only born to fertilize the female mites and that's it. to create this, this, you know, sexual reproduction,

which is a lot more safe than asexual reproduction, stuff because you have these two copies of genes that can kind of balance each other out if you have deleterious mutations, stuff. So that's why it's done. So basically, when the foundress goes in, she's locked in the cell for the entirety of her reproductive period. So she will lay a male egg first,

and then consequently she will lay female eggs, and the females are all fertilized by this one male. that she has laid. I would say they can't survive outside the cell because they don't need to, because they evolved on Apis Serrana, which had a closed-brewed system for probably, you know, over a million years. And, you know, they developed with this, this. They are highly specialized for honeybees. So it's possible that at one point in their evolutionary history, the males could have survived outside a cell, but not anymore because they never need it to. And so the male can't feed or it can?

It can with help. So why the founders is there, she keeps the feeding site open for all of the offspring that don't have the mouth parts to actually bite the larva. So she's got brood care involved in that as well. And I think it's also just energy conservation. They need to develop very quickly. They only have about, you know, nine to 11 days to fully. to fully mature. So it's all about energy conservation.

You know, if you don't need to develop the armor, you need to survive outside the cell, then, you know, because that takes time and energy, then, you know, you do away with it. And so that hits another point because often people ask, why don't they go into queen cells? And I think you hit on it and it's the amount of time that the queen pupates, right? Yeah. So the queen is the fastest cell developed in the entire. colony and it's also the rarest cell to be produced. They don't produce queen cells all the time and stuff.

So I think the number of offspring they'd be able to produce in a queen cell would be the lowest. So that would be the last choice. And, you know, they have, they have their 12 times more likely to choose a drone cell over a worker cell. And it is just that extra few days that allows them to to get one more offspring out or raise the chances of completing the reproductive cycle for the other three. So it's all, it's a balancing act. It's all kind of, you know, you know, energy conservation and economy. Okay, so let's catch a well-fed young, founderist mite and put her away from the bees. How long will she survive?

Ooh, good question. I think, you know, outside of reproduction, they can survive all winter. So that's why we still have mites in the springtime. You've got bees that just they, the mite will kind of cling on to a bee and feed. If she's surviving the way she's not actually sure. Stay with me, Melissa. I want them in a petri dish and I want to watch them run out of fuel and stop functioning. Is that four days?

Is that three? I need to look that. I don't actually know. I have to say. I'm so sorry. I could put a number out, but I don't actually know. I don't know if anyone's done that study. How long they can survive?

I'm going to do it. I'm doing it this year. Do that. Yeah. I don't know. It depends if you want to keep them in hive-like temperatures just without food or if you want to put them in room temperature without food. I would do a few replicates under different conditions and see how long it takes to kill them.

94 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know what that is in Celsius since that's brew temperature. I figure that would be optimum. You can see what kills them first. Is it the cold or is it the food? Yeah. It would be good experiments or run. But I would say, yeah, they can survive pretty long.

I would say they probably have an ability to shut down and conserve resources if they don't have a, you know, they're parasites. So they are like highly specialized to survive on honeybees. So the entire system of honeybees, they probably have a solution for whatever they encounter in that particular type of environment. This is not good. You're basically now like we're describing. Which is why we're having such a problem with them, right? They are really good at surviving. Yeah, if they were super sensitive.

But so when they, so when a cell is uncapped or pupa's uncapped, it is, the founders might survives, but it just prevents her reproduction. Yeah. Yeah. And they don't get a lot of, a lot of chances to reproduce. Okay. So then the way you test for this, how do you, how do you know that they're uncapping for a varroa mite presence rather than just maybe a sick developing pupa?

or some other reason. Yeah, so that's one of the hard parts is disentangling the biases and stuff because there is a high level of variation for a number of different reasons in the honeybee colonies. So most of studies I've designed basically we take a sample of brood in the critical period of August,

you know, when the winter bees are being produced, they're just starting. And we get this snapshot of, you know, the amount of recapping cells that have been recapped, the number of mites that are in this, this little section of brood that we have. And what we've learned from previous studies is that the bees really do target infested cells with recapping. So if there's a mite in there, the cell has a much higher chance of being opened by honeybees.

And this has been true for pretty much every population we've looked at it. So we do know that this behavior is targeting infested cells. And we have these population differences. So we have a population that isn't treated. This population will generally have a much higher. level of recapping. Now there's a catch because the original idea had was well maybe we can use this recapping to quantify the level of you know survivability of these bees and we can use it for

breeding. But if a honeybee colony has mites under control and there are not a lot of mites in the colony, they don't do as much recapping. So it's very difficult to test. You could have a really good survivor that just doesn't have any mites. So you can't quantify the behavior unless you don't do it. you provide some sort of challenge to, you know, to actually get them to perform it. On the other hand, if you have a colony that has a lot of mites, well, maybe they're not doing it right because the mites are there. So then, yeah, and just to recap what you just said, so if they failed to do the final kill,

basically, if they were still uncapping, if they had a low mite level, then they could potentially end mites in that colony where, if I understand what you're saying is, if they get a low threshold of mite occupation in these cells, they just don't spend the energy to uncap because they're just aren't enough. It's not a threat. Yeah. Now that being said, I don't think that our colonies will ever be completely might-free. Like, we're not going to be able to defeat this. The only thing we can do is get our hives, you know, to a level where they're performing these behaviors enough that they can control the parasite themselves. And this is, you know, it's useful in and of itself because the bees can adapt with the mite.

So any changes to the mite population, the bees can balance out without extreme losses in most cases, hopefully. So what's the term for that with these then be mite tolerant bees or mite adapted bees? What do we call them? I like mite resistance because what I've observed is the bees, basically, they keep the population low.

So we did the study in Norway where we looked at these bees, bees from this beekeeper. It was a Bacfast population. The beekeeper's name was Tariya Reynetson, and he's got these surviving bees. We basically monitored 25 of Tariya's colonies alongside 25 of colonies that have been pulled from a population that was regularly treated. And then we just counted bottom boards every single week for an entire season. So we got to see everything that fell from the bottom of the colony. And, you know, in the control population, we got to see. In the control population, we got to see this exponential growth curve that everyone's always plotting so that the line just shot up. And in the resistant population and Tarias population, we basically just had a flat line.

So the number of mites that fell from the colonies, it fluctuated a little bit from colony to colony, but the population average was not significantly different from start point. So the population was present, but it was not getting out of control. You had this balance. So this is this uncapping in these mite threshold levels. This is used as a method of selecting which colonies we want to continue to work with, or what's the tape? That was that was the breeding program, actually. So what we did was designed a breeding program that pretty much any beekeeper could employ.

And then I looked at recapping. I looked at fruit infestation rates. I tracked all of those numbers just to see if what we were doing was impacted. the measures that scientists used to measure Veroa control and stuff. So all we did was we looked at the bottom board counts from spring, summer, and autumn. We took the lowest growth rates and we used that in our algorithm to calculate, you know, the best queens that year while also factoring in honey production and

docility for the two prime factors. And then I would create a list of the, you know, the top 10 scoring queens. and I would give that to the beekeeper. And then he would basically choose some of those queens and then some of the queens that he thought were the best and breed from them. And we would replace, on average, about 50% of the stock a year in the 100 colonies that we had.

And then I would track the data again. And what we found by just counting bottom boards, what we found we actually managed to shift the brood infestation rate in autumn. So it tanked from about 15% on average at the first year to about 5% in the final year. And the recapping accuracy, the rate went up a little bit, but the accuracy just shot up as well from, I think, about 4% to about 35% in four years,

which is quite a lot if you're talking about evolution. So, you know, these traits were present in the population. All we did was kind of make them more abundant. Now, what did you do with these low-performing colonies that did not manage or uncap when they needed to? They were requeened. They were part of the 50% that we requeened. And I instructed the beekeepers if they had colonies with extremely high mite loads to either remove them from the population if they had the space to put them elsewhere

or treat them to just reduce the mite loads so they weren't sharing their mites with the colonies that actually had a shot. That's what I recommend. Yeah, because some researchers had reported that if they left these high mite count colonies in amongst those that were performing well with survivor stock that they could have a domino effect into as that one caved in on itself and it would spread its mite load through the others and maybe overwhelming. And that's what I've observed too.

So it really does hinder your breeding selection if you have these colonies with massive loads of mites. You know, they can flood your other colonies. They can bias your results and stuff. So it's in your best interest as well as, you know, courteous to those around you to treat and remove the colonies that are that are not doing well now the thresholds are probably going to be different for each environment for each country and stuff so you really need to know what your bees can handle and you know what is a bad number in your area and then act accordingly so then prior to re-queaning if you remove the existing queens there then you had the opportunity to do a treatment like

an exhalic acid or something with all the ferretic mice or dispersal phase mites that was that was the thing so the numbers came in and at the end of August in Norway, let's say. And I would say, OK, these colonies, you should treat with Oxalic after the brute is gone. I know, and I hope that they survived. If you wanted to treat before and knock them out of the selection, then do that because you'd have a higher chance of saving

your colony if you did a formic acid in the middle of the season versus Oxalic at the end when they had all the viruses already. Right. And then we would say, OK, it's slate those. If they survive, we requeen them with a better queen and we'll try again. Now, what was the timeframe of this particular study? This was, this started in 2020, and we're going, we're still going.

I'm not getting the brood samples, unfortunately, anymore, but we're still, we're still tracking the mite loads, and we're still running the selection based on the algorithm that I'd signed. Now, do you also get involved in determining what the virus load is, in other words, what are the viruses that are present in these, you know, great upon bees? And there's, what are they carrying? What are there like 10 different viruses?

What do we know about the viruses that are being transmitted by the mites? So there are, there are a few viruses that are transmitted by varroa. By far the most devastating one is deformed wing virus because it shortens the lifespan of the bees. And if you have a long winter, it can be just deadly to, it's a colonies. I think you've also got Sackbrood virus and there's a couple of others that are transmitted, maybe not replicating in the mites,

but definitely transmitted. I had the opportunity to look at some viruses in the Reinhardson bees. And we found that, you know, basically if a bee was infected, it had about the same tighter of viruses as a, you know, a control bee. But there were just fewer bees infected.

with the virus. And I think that has to do with just fewer mites in the colony. So it's directly related to that. I haven't had a chance to look at viruses in the new population that we've done. These are carniolin bees, but I would love to get a chance to do that. Now often when they uncap, they'll chew the brood. Is there, why do they do that? So, I mean, protein is very limited when you've got a diet like honeybees have. So protein, basically, they get from pollen and nothing else. So they've got honey and they've got pollen. So brood, because the diet of the brood is almost exclusively protein,

it's very expensive. So all that protein is locked up in these brood. And if they decide that the brood needs to disappear for some reason, just throwing it out is throwing out a lot of nutrients that the nurses can actually reabsorb. And convert back into brood food. So they recycle the proteins is what's going. going on there. So I want to recap that. So they chew the brood, which and then that actually can help

them feed developing larvae? Yeah, it saves them having to go out and get more pollen, which may or may not be possible depending on the weather. So it's a survival mechanism they have in place, you know, because their environment is so volatile. So technically these larvae are meat eaters. They can be. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. workers can be. They do cannibalized brood to reabsorpe the nutrients. That is interesting because I did, you know, because I take photographs of all these conditions. So I get chewed brood, bald brood, sack brood, and the uncappings and everything else. And then I just hand them over. But this is really interesting too to give me a little

more information about what I'm even looking at. If I wanted to collect mites for photography, would they stay? Like we know at the last point when they're about to emerge. from their pupa state, the mites that are in there with the founders would be at their strongest, right? At what point does the male die out? If I wanted to catch a live male and get a shot of them, what's the best stage of development under that capping to find a male mite that's still viable so I could get them all these alive? Oh, definitely. That's nine days post-capping. Nine days post-capping. That is the time that we do the brute assessments because, you you can get a full might family, all the different stages,

uh, in that time just before the first, uh, daughter matures into a founder's and you can't tell the difference between the two, the mother or the daughter, right? So that, at that time, the male is fully matured. And, uh, so he's got basically is a little white blob with spindly legs and the legs are rusty colored with, with little hairs on them. And that's how you distinguish him from the

Protonymph, the female protonymp. Yeah, they do. They got hairy legs and they're tingeed with red. Now, you're an artist. Have you not done technical illustrations of these things? Do you bring a sketchbook with you? Not of the mites, but that's a good idea. I'm thinking I'm going to write that down to do for later,

created illustration. Just remember who told you when you have your exhibit, just remember. All right. I might release them open source, but I will mention your name. Okay, now let's forget about everybody else who might be listening and focus on what I want. Do I need to keep these things humid? In other words, so now I'm going to cut a section out of drone cells, capped drones. We do this at the ninth day, and I want to keep them in the most survivable, humidity level, and temperature.

What would be optimum? Well, they die pretty quickly outside of a hive. So if you want to get them live, you probably need to take it to, you know, studio. Well, I can put the whole frame in an incubator that has a glass. You can do that. Yeah. And they'll probably survive for, you know, at least, I would say at least six to 12 hours, depending on the conditions you have. Okay, that's all I need. All right. But sooner the better, because they really just don't do well outside of cells. That's not good news. What about the humidity level? What's optimum for them? Anything that's inside a colony, inside a captive brood cell?

That's what you use. We have tried to replicate colony conditions to breed them in the lab. It is very hit or miss. I think we've only just figured out a methodology that works. It was, it evaded us for a long time. 5% relative humidity somewhere around there. Whatever's in a colony. I can't remember the exact number.

I just know it's 34 degrees. And that's Celsius. I don't even know what you're talking about. Sorry. Yeah, I've been working in Europe. You get Celsius from me. Yeah, everybody wants Celsius. Let me tell you.

So, oh, man, I had another question. I totally forgot what it was. So the other thing is these studies in this method that you're describing, what is in your book that is not in your published studies? Right. So I've got some help on this book. So it's not just me writing this. I've got Professor Stephen Martin and I've got Marla Spivak also,

Professor Malice Spivak writing. And they have a lot more insights. I've been doing this for, you know, just over a decade. You know, they've been doing this for longer than that. So I get to draw on their experience. And I've, you know, I've had a chance to have conversations with them. And they just know so much.

And they know a lot about rural resistance in different populations. So we all have a piece of this puzzle. And we've been doing this for years. So I think we have a decent amount of information and a decent number of cases that we can start putting this in a book. because as far as I know, rural resistance is kind of like a far away concept in the U.S. And people are like, they know it exists,

but they don't think it's a viable strategy to start breeding varro resistant bees in the States given the system that you guys have. People are already trying. They're already doing this, you know, from hobby beekeepers to a few industry beekeepers as well. So this is a thing that is happening. And, you know, we're trying our best to get the information out there.

And I think a book is probably one of the best ways to do that as well. with all three of our names on it. Yeah. So now who's the book for? Is this for, can a backyard beekeeper derive some good best practices from this book or ways of selecting good stock for perpetuating your backyard apiary? What? We're writing it for any beekeeper who wants to try.

And I think the difference between a backyard beekeeper and industry beekeepers, the number of hives they have. an industry beekeeper, if they had a little bit of extra time half, they can, you know, run an experiment on a small number of hives. They don't have to replace their entire operation. And I think that is how one of the paw line line lineages started as well, where they're just working with a small number of bees while they had their operations going, seeing what worked, and then replacing the queen slowly. So what we hope that this book is going to be is we're basically they take a bunch of case studies from all over the world,

catalog what the beekeepers have done, how they started, how they got their results, how they managed their stock, what problems they had. And we're going to draw parallels from all these different cases and come up with something of a best practices kind of advice. You know, it's not going to be a step-by-step, do this,

and you'll absolutely have resistant bees because the environments and the conditions are so variable, you know, how much money people have, where they are, how much space they have, how much natural diversity is next to them, how close they are to other beekeepers, everything plays a role into the selection of rural resistance, right? So the best thing we can do is take as many examples as we have, you know, outline the conditions and then, you know, beekeepers can read, okay, what case is closest to mine and what did they do? So that's what we're hoping to develop. And then using our scientific expertise to interpret this, to make the parallels and to present this in an easy to digest format. And this is going to be specifically for beekeepers. And so you brought in Dr. Marla Spivak from the Spivak Lab at the University of Minnesota Bee Lab. Yeah. Is she focused at all on propolis?

And a lot of her research centered around the medicinal value of propolis and the hive. Is that part of her contribution or is she specifically Varroa? We're going to do mostly Varroa, but I mean, propolis is probably going to come up because it is a very important part of hive maintenance and disease control. So it's basically they're disinfectant. So how much propolis they have, you know, what they use and stuff has a, it does play a big role in controlling pathogens that we can't see. You know, I make an observation that Tarias hives, they were full of propolis.

And he liked it that way. He did not try and breed for lower propolis production. Now, do you think in the past when people did because it got in the way of being able to work a hive, only now we know its value, do you think they were actually working against the bees when they were starting to select for those that were not bringing in a lot of propolis and putting it on those interior surfaces? So now we've flipped and we want it all back, right? It's like if you basically took away people's supply of soap. Like, we're just going to take that away from you. You get like one bottle of soap a year. you're going to see a rise in pathogen transfer definitely people are going to get colds and and fever and flu much more often yeah if you get dirty you can survive it and you hearty stock yeah okay yeah so i mean if if a bee has something that's naturally in their hive you should definitely be asking what are they using it for and what would it do if i took it away from them before you start

like changing things in their environment. Now you mentioned carniolan stock. Is there other, are there other known stocks that already kind of have an advantage towards this uncapping practice? Any stock that is selected for it. Just selecting. Which is interesting.

So, I mean, even in the control colonies, you know, the first stock that I researched was buckfast. You know, I know there's carniolins. I know there's British blacks that are, that have are black bees, molyphra milifer and alifera that have resistance. So, I mean, And these hygienic behaviors that I talked about, these general hygienic behaviors, they are innate in every single stock of honeybee.

So, you know, in theory, every single stock has the potential to develop resistances to Varroa. And so, you know, as I promote kind of local breeding as well, because if you're bringing genetic stock from other areas, you have things that are suddenly not adapted to the environment that you're working in. So I always recommend, you know, breeding from stock that you have in that area. Right. Regionally adapted stock. Yeah, regionally adapted. And in our perfect world, we'd all get together and all of our friends would be doing the same thing and selecting for the same uncapping trades.

And then it would just ripple out and we would all have great control, but it doesn't work that way. Not yet. We need a little more collaboration. But I mean, this is the start of it. It's talking. It's talking. It's sharing like ideas.

It's finding other people that think the same and forming group. and, you know, having more, you know, basically just having more contact with people that are one that want to do this. And that's how it starts. And it kind of, you know, blossoms out. And then you get, you know, you get actual cases of resounding success. So nobody believed Tariya when he said, actually, I don't treat my bees. He either got, you know, how dare you, you're killing all of your bees or, no, I don't believe you. You're treating them in secret somewhere. Like in the middle of the night, you're going out with these assets. No. So, you know, working. with Tari and publishing, you know, creating scientific literature saying, actually, here's the evidence.

You can go and replicate it if you want to, you know, really helped. And now they have a national strategy for rural resistance. It's in their national breeding program as well. So that's how it starts. You know, you had someone who's through a PhD student at the problem and we published some meaningful results and then people started talking about it. Yeah. Now does you're both have a title? Working title is called resisting varroa. Resisting varroa. Yeah.

And the subtitle is a knowledge and advice from scientists and beekeepers on breeding varroa resistant bees. Okay. And would this fall under the category of Darwinian or natural beekeeping or do you assign any kind of practice of the survivor stock? What are we calling it? I would say this is just bee breeding. This is, this is kind of.

coming up against a problem that you have with bees and breeding away around it, like we've always done. And your Kickstarter is April the 9th, but you have a Kickstarter website. We do. It is up. So I hope you will share the link with all of your viewers. We will. And for those who are just listening, if you would tell us what the website is. Oh, yeah. So it is, it's a Kickstarter.com slash projects slash resisting. varroa all one word and i think that would get you there there's also another slash resisting dash varroa but i think that's the resisting varroa should get you there and if that doesn't then putting resisting varroa in the search well definitely it'll be the first head okay and how does the kickstarter

work i mean if the if you don't get enough backers what happens when people contribute um does it just so the project is said to end on april 9th that's when the funding closes if we don't meet her a goal by then. It ends April 9th. Yeah, it ends. So we are you know in the final moments of the Kickstarter here. Oh, you guys, do YouTube right now and go and put your money in this Kickstarter. Yeah, and we

really need the support. So if it doesn't meet its goal, then everybody gets their money back and the project ends. And that's just what it is. And then I need to figure something else out to write the book, but you know. I can't believe you don't have a publisher that's reached out and wanted to just take

this on. Having to do it. That's step that's that's maybe another way we could do it. Why I wanted to do the Kickstarter first is because I can control the price point if we self-publish. We do this ourselves. And what I wanted to do, you know, in memory of Tadia actually, because he passed away just over a year ago, is basically made the price point for the e-book very low so that everybody has a chance to get a copy of this book. That's what I wanted to do. And of course, going through a publisher, I lose control of the price point, basically. Is it going to be an audible book?

I don't know. We don't have plans yet. This is still, you know, this is still in its baby stages of development. You know, we've got an outline for the book and we have the research collected. But we're at stage one, I think, of this book, trying to get funding. So if you get the funding, and you will. Then within a year, we will have a book. Will there be auditions for the narrator for your audible version? Yeah, are you an applicant?

Should I write your name down? I always wanted to. I would set up a whisper room in here if I could get a gig. I think that would be a fantastic idea. All right, I'll put your name down if we get this. And, you know, of course, if we don't get funding, then I still want to produce the book. It will take a lot more time, and it's very difficult to guarantee exactly when we would be able to see that. So I really hope we do get the funding.

It would be really great if we could just get this done because it's looking at what's happening right now. I think we might need it. It sounds very important. And I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank you for coming on and sharing how you arrived at what you're doing and what your kind of philosophy is in the current worldview of the honeybee in its place in our ecosystem. And do you have closing thoughts or things you'd like to share?

It's a message for the beekeepers right now. You know, I know it looks really scary, but, you know, hang in there and talk to one another. talk about your experiences, talk about what's happened, talk about what you can do. Because, you know, if you go in a group to the government to say this needs to change, you know, they will actually listen. It might take some time, you know, but don't give up. And borough resistance is a real thing, and a lot of beekeepers are now, you know, dealing with treatment-free beekeeping very successfully. And I think, you know, this is this is what's going to happen in the future. You know, we're going to, we're going to commandeer evolution and use it to help us rather than continuously fight it.

And that is the long game. Genetics are the long game. I gave up on treatment-free bekeeping after 10 years and did kind of though what you're describing those. So I'm not totally bad or totally good because I did, you know, rather than euthanize a colony, I would treat those that were low. performers and not use them for reproduction. Yeah. There's no bad or good, honestly. There's just bees.

Requeenning them. So minimal treatments, but the long game is genetics. And I'm really glad that you're a voice out there for that. And I hope that this is beneficial to people that are listening. So thanks a lot. So I hope so too. And I hope people, if you're on Podbean, or if you're here watching on YouTube, go to the comment section and look for those links.

And I think it would be great if we could all support this book and make it happen. Thanks a lot for your time. Thank you so much. And that wraps up another episode of interviews with experts. I hope you found today's interview interesting and helpful. If you like this content, I invite you to subscribe so you won't miss a single episode. Please visit the video description where you'll find convenient links to more information about Dr. Adi's book. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this has been The Way to Be.