Randy Oliver says: "Steve, how far do you live from Grass Valley, Calif?  
Give me your cell number, and I'll invite you to help!  I can use eager 
volunteers such as yourself."

   I would consider it a privilege and an honor, and I would have already 
done so but alas I live on Whidbey Island in Washington State and am no 
stranger to poverty myself, being a poor potter by trade.  If I ever get a 
chance, though, I will be glad to help out and be happy to learn a thing or 
two in the bargain. 

   An experienced beekeeper such as your self certainly has every right to 
his or her hunches, but it seems to me that this virus thing is extremely 
hard to pin down.  If, as you suspect, lower levels of Varroa infestations 
are resulting in increased colony mortality because of the viruses that the 
mites supposedly carry, then either bee immune systems are getting less 
robust or viruses are evolving more virulent strains or both.  Can you 
think of any logical reasons why this might be happening?
  
   One thing that comes to my mind is that one or both of these factors 
could be appearing as an inadvertent result of breeding programs that focus 
on other more easily identifiable characteristics.  For example, hygienic 
behavior might not be of any advantage in protecting against viruses that 
come at the bee immune system from an angle that is not dealt with by such 
behavior.  If the breeding focus is kept narrowly on hygienic behavior to 
the extent that the immune system that would itself directly confront a 
threatening virus is allowed to drift or lapse through an inadvertent 
removal of selective pressure, then over time you might find that the virus 
becomes a more serious problem than the mite or whatever that was the 
visible target of the desired hygienic behavior.  By a similar token, if 
you breed for characteristics that limit the path that the virus takes to 
get to the bee, you might well be inadvertently selecting FOR viruses that 
are increasingly able to take advantage of the reduced opportunity by 
becoming more lethal or using less guarded paths.  Once a lethal virus 
enters the picture there apparently is very little anyone can do.  You 
can't even say for certain in the case of honey bees if it was a virus that 
killed your colonies even though in a lot of cases it's a pretty good bet.  
Anyway, Randy, if what you suspect is true, and it seems reasonable enough 
to me, then it means the viruses have come home to roost.  What can be done 
about it?  You would have to be willing to stop fighting certain things in 
certain ways, and let nature take it's course.  We might be talking cold 
turkey here.  This is the position small cell organic beekeepers take, and 
if they are right we will all owe them a great debt of gratitude one day, 
because we will all be buying our bees from them.  Not yet though.

Steve Noble

     
       

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