Peter L. Borst wrote:
> A pathogen, however mighty, clever, and enduring, cannot and must not and
> should not and will not wipe out its host completely, a self-defeating,
> self-anihilating process because its own survival depends on the very
> viability of its host.  What is it going to eat when all the bees are
> gone?  
This assumes that a parasite is specific to one and only one host. If it 
can go to other species, it can wipe out one of them and still survive 
very well on the other.

The other problem with this is that it is not the Varroa that does the 
killing but the virus. Varroa have little control over them, since they 
start with the bee. It is the virus that the bee has to be able to 
control to survive. Birds in the NE US are declining at a fairly high 
rate because of West Nile virus. Virus tend to operate in cycles since 
they kill off most hosts until the host population grows large enough 
for the virus to spread. Since bees are already in that state every 
year, virus will tend to kill more bees off more often.

Add that many bacterial diseases can remain dormant for long periods so 
they also care little about their host. Virus can cross species, so they 
are also not on the "only want to get along" list. Neither has read what 
they are supposed to do.

There are some interesting papers on "the balance of nature" that argue, 
persuasively, that it is a myth. Nature is never in balance otherwise we 
nor any other species would exist, since nature would have been in 
balance and all would stop with single cell organisms, if it even got 
that far.

It would be nice to assume that a host/pathogen relationship would exist 
to allow a species to survive, but the extinction record does not bear 
it out. Lot of fossils out there.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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