On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 08:21:30AM -0400, Rick Green wrote:
> Why is it that we have been treating for years with tera patties and have not
> grown a resistant strain of foulfbrood but in a few short years we have
> resistant mites?  Could some biologist explain why a bacteria has not grown
> resistant while a member of the mite family has.
>

The short answer is, that bacteria are a lot more different from bees than
mites are.  It is therefore relatively easy to find a treatment that
will kill bacteria without killing bees, because the drug can attack
features of the bacteria that bees don't even *have*, like rigid cell
walls. It is quite hard to find something that will kill mites without
killing bees, because they have very similar biological traits, and all
the mites have to do to become resistant to a given treatment is evolve
to become more like the bees in whatever respect will keep it from
killing them.

It's as if humans were parasitized by, say, dogs.  Finding a drug
that would kill dogs without killing us would be hard, and anything
we did find would probably just be a matter of being a bit less toxic
to us than to the parasitic dogs.  For example, we could use chocolate
to treat severe dog infestations, because it is more toxic to them than
to us.  But, after a few iterations, the dogs that were more resistant
to chocolate would be able to handle as much as we can.  Without the
toxicity difference, chocolate could no longer be useful for clearing
up dog problems, and we'd have to find something else, like onions.
The whole cycle would then repeat, until we ran out of choices and
had to go back to picking off dogs by hand.

--
Tim Eisele
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