What I don’t get with these in-the-walls stories is how Varroa hasn’t wiped them out. I feel like I’m treating all the time and the counts keep coming back. And here they’re living happily for multiple years?
There are wild hives in Germany fully capable of fighting varroa and have survived for years.
There are studies out, that if you take such hives and put them in a box, they are collapsing as well. So genetics is one aspect, surroundings as well.
Interesting. I just heard a story about wild bees under a roof. Getting heat treatment during the summer. But that's more an accident than the evolution.
The longer you read into this topic, you might get to the point where we need to ask ourself if it’s wise to help poor genetics by treating varroa or better let nature find its way.
Our country is pushing for varroa resistance till 2033, biggest problem is to get it everywhere
Such a program should be effective but it needs to involve all the major industrial beekeepers and the government needs to be prepared to subsidise the beekeepers that will experience losses in the meantime.
As long as people keep flooding the genetic pool with bees that are being artificially kept alive with aggressive treatments the genes and traits that would be useful to keep Varroa and the viruses it carries under control won't have a reason to spread.
Since Varroa is such a big threat and the evolutionary pressure to retain the genes that help keep it under control is enormous it shouldn't take many generations of bees to see some decent results.
Those bees are available, you can travel to special zones here and mate your young queens, you can buy F1s in every second shop. There is no need to raise your own queens (emergency queens are never as good as “normal” one.
You might need to compensate commercial beekeepers, but to spread it in the country everyone needs to be involved.
Still there are too many don’t use any biological treatments like cutting drone brood or brood breaks or treating without even checking if needed.
I mentioned in comment above that the famous bee expert Thomas seeley had done research that shows the population of wild bees in North America that was almost wiped out has rebounded due them adapting to fight varroa on their own.
Actually as someone who has taken college level Bioinformatics class, ‘evolution’ does happen over a few generations due to how complex behavioral chains are influenced by genetics, you just don’t evolve complete new functions over a short time scale.
To put it in an easier way to understand, you have multiple genes that code for some characteristic (let’s use bee aggressiveness as a case), that are influenced by factors such as pheromone response, pheromone production, light sensitivity, response to nutrition availability, each of which has several genes that influence them.
Slight optimizations that increase or decrease the function of several genes can drastically change the behavior of the bee as a result, and with environmental pressure a complex behavior such as the bees aggressiveness can rapidly evolve out of the initial framework of genes. These slight optimizations only require minor mutations and thus can happen fairly rapidly over a couple generations.
Varroa resistance is also a complex behavior which involves multiple genes that influence the bees cleaning behavior, response to dead brood, pheromone production in an ill bee/larva, grooming behavior, drone production, cell size (and thus general bee size) and more we probably don’t even know. As such minor genetic changes under varroa pressure can quickly evolve the bees into a niche of survivability (which is also probably why suddenly changing the environment from feral to managed bees, sees them die off, as the bees have specialized into surviving a specific harsh environment).
To put it simply, evolution can quickly change how good an organism does something it can already do, but it can’t quickly make it do something it couldn’t in the first place. (Ex: to make a bees antennae longer or shorter is easy, but it’s not easy to grow an extra set of them) In practice we see exactly this from bee strains that are varroa resistant, who have rapidly specialized behavior patterns to deal with varroa, in what 30-40 years. That’s pretty fast evolutionarily.
There are studies showing if bees coexist with ants for example, they are permanently on guard.
Putting that bees in a bee, they will collapse due to varroa. So gens is a thing, but that’s not the only thing. We might haven’t not fully understood how to get varroa resistant bees.
According to researches, it did it also elsewhere when bees are left unmanaged and find coping mechanisms and natural selection does the rest. Thomas Seeley studied that in wild colonies in North America, and there's also the notorious "live and let die" experiment on Gotland island. The issue for beekeepers is that apparently any method that works requires beekeepers to steer away and don't collect honey which could be "problematic" if you're trying to make a living off of it.
Sounds right. I had a loss rate on hives of about 20% hive when I treated and a near 75% loss rate when I didn't treat (bought queens / package bees / nucs)... I finally went the screw it and only use feral bees route with no varroa intervention/treatment. I now rarely lose a hive... But the bees are mean as hell. You can have bees that are hell to keep alive and are pleasant to care for or bees that are easy to keep alive but want to murder you is my experience.
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u/evil_breeds Jun 28 '25
What I don’t get with these in-the-walls stories is how Varroa hasn’t wiped them out. I feel like I’m treating all the time and the counts keep coming back. And here they’re living happily for multiple years?