Hello All,

In 1999 Mark Hale of South Africa posted a message to Bee-L in which he said that hives with Varroa became nearly mite-free soon after several dozen pseudoscorpions appeared among the bees. Later Eddy Lear published a note in a similar vein in a South African beekeeping newsletter.

After the confirmation of the presence of Varroa in New Zealand in April this year I contacted Mark and began a literature search, and in July published a short article in The New Zealand Beekeeper Volume 7 Number 6, pp 22-23, 2000: "Could Pseudoscorpions from South African beehives control our Varroa"?

Briefly, and as several people have posted, there are reported to be two species of pseudoscorpions living among bees in South African hives. Adults are about 6 mm long. Pseudos (for short) are said to prey upon pollen mites, the bee fly, and insect larvae such as those of wax moths, and also almost certainly larvae of the hive beetles (2 species). Bees are thought not to be preyed upon.

I was unable to find any recent research or researchers working on pseudos and honey bees anywhere. However I did find a paper which reported that a pseudo of a different species that lives among bees in the Belgian Congo did appear to kill a bee when the two were confined together in a container. This suggests that great caution needs to be exercised before pseudos are imported into hives of European honey bees. We need to determine whether in fact pseudos will eat Varroa, and whether or not they eat bee eggs and/or larvae.

Intriguingly, in 1922 an item in Bee World suggested that perhaps acarine mites erupted because Chelifer cancroides no longer had breeding sites in modern clean sawn-timber hives, whereas skeps had numerous nooks and crannies that sheltered pseudo nests. If this is true, then perhaps restoration of breeding sites for pseudos within our hives may lessen many of the problems being experienced with mites and insects?

At least one species of pseudos lives in colonies of the eastern honey bee, so perhaps it predates Varroa, and if so, this may contribute to the lack of a Varroa problem in Apis cerana?

The New Zealand Government has recently established a fund for research on Varroa. I will apply for support to travel to South Africa to determine whether pseudos do in fact eat Varroa, and also bee eggs etc. If Varroa ar eaten, but bees are not, the next step would be to introduce pseudos to our European subspecies of bees in quarantine to discover whether the two are compatable. If they are, whether pseudos should be introduced to New Zealand would have to be considered by our Government-run Environmental Risk Management Authority ( a sort of court that hears cases for and against proposals to introduce new organisms to NZ).

So to date there appears to be every possibility that South African pseudos are indeed eating Varroa, and are not eating bees. Objective evidence as to whether this is so is yet to be produced. If true, and if pseudos and European bees are compatable, we may have a biological control for Varroa that could be introduced to beehives everywhere. A bonus is that other pestiferous mites and insects may also be controlled.

However again a word of caution. We do not know if bees may be eaten, so pseudos should not be moved out of Africa until research produces facts. If pseudos ate bee eggs and/or larvae, introducing pseudos to our hives could be disastrous. Nevertheless, what we do know about pseudos suggests that they are entirely beneficial, and that their absence from modern `clean' hives is abnormal.

Best wishes to all,
Barry Donovan.



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