Grim goings on in the hive as incestuous parasite invades
News from the Fonmon Apiary
| Fonmon Apiary news with Harold Williams
All beekeepers today should acquaint themselves with the invasive mite Varroa Destructor.
This mite is an alien introduction to the UK. It has origins in the Far East and just how it arrived here is not clear. Given that we Homo sapiens tend to ship goods all around the world, it is not too difficult to suppose that we aided this mite to cross barriers that it would not naturally cross. However, the devastation this introduction has created in the Honeybee world is only too apparent today.
To get an insight into the harm this tiny mite causes we must acquaint ourselves with its lifecycle and makeup once it infests a colony of bees. A Queen bee’s egg laying is the start of the mayhem. Each egg is eventually going to become a larvae and this larvae is going to become the host to a female Varroa who is ready to commence her own breeding cycle.
How? Well nurse bees will be feeding the larvae and will eventually deposit food in the cell and seal it over with a cap of wax, where metamorphosis gets under way and the outcome should see a new bee emerge.
However, once the food is deposited in the cell our Varroa mite is well aware of this. It invades the cell and gets sealed in when the wax cap is added. She selects an egg laying site on the cell wall and also a feeding site on the body of the developing larvae. The first egg to hatch is a male and he mates with his mother!
Four more eggs arrive and become female mites, and the male mates with each of them. He now dies having performed his duty. All of these mites are feeding from the body of the developing larvae, sucking out fluids and body fats. This feeding regime does not kill our developing bee but she is going to emerge as a very sick individual.
The mites carry viruses that are passed to our bee as each of them visit the feeding site. Of note is the fact that the mite cannot remove the wax capping, it is entirely dependent on the emerging new bee to do this. A period of some 12 days will have passed since the cell was capped over; it often happens that the bee is ready to emerge before the developing mites have reached adulthood and have developed a hard outer shell so that they can withstand the conditions that they will meet inside a beehive.
They die as a result of this shortcoming in their makeup; nonetheless they have been feeding and causing stress to our new bee. With the Queen laying some 2,000 eggs per day, the opportunity for many thousands of mites to develop is obvious.
Activities within a beehive are all concluded in the dark! Our mites have no eyes, nor ears but lots of hairs that transmit information, along with chemical receptors that tell them all they need to know so that they can react when and where required to ensure their future survival. There is much more to this mite saga than my brief description has portrayed, suffice to say our emerging sick bees do not survive. What can be done?
Harold Williams
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• | News from the Fonmon Apiary
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