Hi All
 
Recently attended a sminar by Dr Gary Needham from Ohio State. He is
an acarologist - ie works on mites/ticks and things with eight legs
that damge other things (whose names I cannot remember).
 
It was a very interesting talk and a I strongly recommend bee groupds
to get him to talk about  their work.
 
He mentioned their work on crisco patties. Apparently it was found
that a femal tracheal mite crawls out of the bee when it senses
things are getting a bit over crowded. It then hands on a protrusion
on the bee and waves it's legs around sensing anything else it
touches. It can detect the wax and fat composition of a bees
exterior.
 
From work that was done here at Rhodes it has been shown that a young
bee has a very different waxy structure to an old bee. I gather that
Gary and friends detected that bees that are old dont pass the grade
as good hosts because they don't have the richt wax structure.
 
Nevertheless, if one gives the bees crisco, they smear it all over
themselves, and begin to smell like 'old bees' to the mites. As a
result, any mite that comes out of a bee sits and waves it's feet
around until it dies from loss of energy and starvation - none of the
host bees smell young enough as a result of intereference by crisco
in changing the wax and fat layer!!
 
Quite neat.
 
 
Keep well
 
Garth
 
Garth Cambray           Camdini Apiaries
15 Park Road
Grahamstown             Apis mellifera capensis
6139
South Africa
 
Time = Honey
 
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