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 ****************************************************** * Full guidelines for BEE-L posting are at: * * http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm * ******************************************************