In message <000e01c78601$25157140$1abc59d8@BusyBeeAcres>, Bob Harrison 
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>In Europe you mostly run dark races which had been exposed to TM.

Acarine mites (TM to you) are endemic at least in the UK. They have not 
been a major problem here in many many years. This has caused people to 
suggest the mites are of less vigour or have died out or whatever, which 
is also untrue. See below.


> In the
>U.S. we mostly run Italian bees which in the 80's had NEVER seen a TM. My
>Italian bees have always had problems dealing with TM. Treatment once a
>year costs around fifty cents plus labor. Left untreated for a couple years
>they start crashing in winter.

Well, even in Italian stock you find some tolerant (prefer that term to 
resistant) stock in the US. Back in the 1980's I used to buy a lot of 
queens (a lot in UK terms anyway, a tiny amount in your terms) from 
various breeders and races. Italians as you say were very liable to mite 
problems, and did not give much honey in our climate anyway. My personal 
favourite at the time was the Midnite (I got them from York's), which 
worked well here and gave good harvests. However, like all the US stock 
I tried up until I met the NWC, they were very liable to go fine for a 
season, and then over the next couple they died out in large numbers 
showing all the classic external symptoms which pointed the finger at 
these mites. The mites were still here of course, and as soon as 
susceptible stock appeared they showed their hand.

However Bob, one of your current favourite suspects is viruses, and not 
too long ago  this subject was discussed, and there was some valuable 
input from Norman Carreck, which finger viruses as actually the main 
cause of perceived TM symptoms, and that no real link was found between 
these symptoms and the mites. He stopped short of calling it 
coincidental but seemed to imply so, and that somehow the conditions 
that favoured the mite also favoured the viruses, and that they had been 
unable to show a direct mite related vector of spread. My personal 
opinion is that something must have been being missed 
somewhere.........it seems a very big co-incidence..........and the 
conditions for the virus in the US MUST have existed at times in the 
past when TM were not there, so why the huge die off when the mites 
arrived if mites are not a vector of spread.?

>>Only the relatively few colonies that have more than 30% of their bees
>infested   are more likely to die than uninfested colonies - because of the
>slightly  shortened lives of infested bees - and then only in late winter or
>early
>
>If the all the above Bailey said was true in the U.S. would we have lost
>over a million commercial hives to TM in the 80's when TM arrived?
>
I did not know Bailey. However, in the UK we have a bit of a problem 
with some thinking our little island state has the answer to everyone 
else's problems and that 'foreign' research is somehow inferior. (We 
tend to extrapolate our local experiences into areas where it is 
actually invalid, and there is often a failure to appreciate the 
necessary cultural differences between real sharp end commercial honey 
producers and their ways of operating, and UK methods, almost all of 
which (some of mines included) are amateur derived.)

Bailey's statement and your losses are not actually mutually exclusive, 
especially if you accept his statement being in a UK context and yours 
being in a US one. 'All beekeeping is local' (in terms of both location 
and timing) raises its head again. I suspect his quoted statement to be 
incomplete and I am sure this would have been clear from a full 
transcript. Talk was about UK experiences at the time. UK experience in 
the 1920's would have told you a very different story, and as regards 
the timeline of exposure that is where you were in the 1980's. I still 
remember my father showing me TM related symptoms as a boy back in the 
1960's, when we still had occasional upwellings of it, and the relict 
susceptible stock was still causing vulnerability.

Nowadays in native stock I never see symptomatic TM problems, and know 
what stock from other parts is likely to show similar qualities. ( Not 
naming names on list.)

CCD related to TM?  Don't know. However, the last really serious event 
of that nature in my local area, (a few minor ones have happened since) 
was spring 1986. I got off lightly here, although it might have been 
better if I had not. One neighbour lost 494 out 501 that year. Mostly 
the same symptoms...........very few bees and a queen 
remaining.....sometimes as few as 20 adult bees...a patch of brood 
hopelessly large for the bees to care for...........no mites (varroa was 
not present at the time). Cause? Summer 1985 was the cause. Nothing for 
the bees to get in terms of natural supplies from the start of July 
onwards. Weather truly awful (can also be caused by drought as one of 
the lesser events in the 90's showed) and not enough nutrients gathered. 
Not enough young bees raised. Old bees dying off, but still just enough 
of them to keep carrying away the dead, so you ended with largely clean 
hives with plenty of stores, usually pollen too as these old bees burned 
out and died once the weather opened up for them, so they gathered stuff 
but had very short lives remaining. Yes it started in autumn when very 
poor colony size and condition was already apparent. Rapid dwindling 
happened up to New year in many cases, and later many collapsed away to 
next to nothing as soon as spring 86 hit.

No robbing? Yes it was the same. Why? There were not enough strong 
colonies remaining to do the robbing, and all the dead outs were a 
veritable smorgasbord to them. Too much available and not enough bees to 
exploit it.

Why did I think I might have been better taking the hit like the others? 
Too many were so drastically weakened that it took most of 1986 to get 
them up to any level of bee power at all. Remember many were down to a 
single seam of bees, often even that partial, and we got them through 
1986 in the hope of getting them through the winter................only 
to take a further heavy loss that winter too as they really had not 
built up enough to get through properly. Would have been better to clear 
the decks of these dinks and make fresh splits.

Same as CCD? I don't pretend to know, but for sure, once we were over 
the hump into summer 1987 (when I still had a stock of stores filled 
dead outs sealed up in my yard) colonies established in these self same 
boxes prospered as normal and there was never any evidence of bees 
avoiding them.

BTW, to anyone who wants to ask 'Why did you not feed 
them?'...........the hives were on our heather all through the dearth 
period. Heather yields like crazy in most conditions with adequate 
rainfall, with plenty of nectar and plenty of pollen. We had plentiful 
flowering, and all the bees were on a flowering crop.............all it 
needed to put things right was a week of reasonable weather....a lot 
less time than it would have taken to feed them all (closed hive top 
feeders here so you dont feed your neighbour too, which they would be 
happy to accept and not reciprocate!)......and it just seemed impossible 
that we would not get it. We didn't, and by the end of August the die 
was cast for the winter ahead.

This year? CCD/ Marie Celeste syndrome? None. Best wintering in living 
memory. Many apiaries with zero losses. Overall maybe 
3%..............and almost all of those are due to dud queens.
-- 
Murray McGregor

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