Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off

Honeybees are not all bees, and are less important than wild/native ground bees[0]. By making this about trump, you are burying the lede here:

"Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal."

This is to be expected, eventually evolution will produce a small amount of a species that is resistant to a chemical, then those will likely be hyper successful at breeding. Honeybees are not native to the Americas, it seems like we've imported a major feast for these mites. Perhaps there's another organism that preys on these mites. Nature often provides the a cure with the poison.

[0] - https://choosenatives.org/articles/native-bees-need-buzz/

A recent paper on this topic (same general message as on the linked website):

> We found compelling evidence that honey bee introductions indirectly decrease pollination by reducing nectar and pollen availability and competitively excluding visits from more effective native bees. In contrast, the direct impact of honey bee visits on pollination was negligible, and, if anything, negative. Honey bees were ineffective pollinators, and increasing visit quantity could not compensate for inferior visit quality.

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy....

Also:

> Feral bee colonies usually just die after 18-24 months. That's long enough to swarm repeatedly, so mite pressure isn't really a threat to honeybees as a species in the wild. They live long enough to reproduce and almost nobody tries to harvest honey from them for sale. There's basically no chance that mites will make feral honeybees go extinct. Rather, mite parasitism's an economic problem that threatens commercial beekeeping [...]. Keeping bees alive with both mites and pesticides, especially in the face of climate change, is really hard if you need to make money doing it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Beekeeping/comments/10jtmgk/wild_be...

The SLF infestation was met with a whole lot of handwaving, of "look how dangerous this is", but not much in terms of concrete solutions. Then the population naturally stabilized as predators started feeding on them with basically no action taken other than some city weirdoes stomping on them. Turns out you don't need almighty Scientists to do Nature's job all the time. If this situation is different I'm open to the idea that intervention is needed, but all this parroting of uninformed BlueSky propaganda claiming everything is going to fall apart any time now, just you wait, is getting old. In January planes were falling out of the sky because Trump, in February no more social security because Trump, in March we can't forecast the weather anymore because Trump, in April staglation because Trump, in May World War 3 because Trump, in June forest fires because Trump, and in July Trump is killing the bees. What will the madman do next!

I came from a town where farmers work with university scientists and the ones who don't are basically doing tourist farm stands. Likewise, I see the NSF + NIH funding cuts from fellow scientists, eg, cancer researchers, being cut, and hear from multiple agency leaders navigating it but cannot speak out publicly. But feel good about pretending scientists do nothing and modern medicine and food supply isn't due to them.

And yes, if you think the scientists self-reporting on their funding cuts are fake, the objective truth problem is most definitely you.

Yes - species becoming resistant to our efforts to contain them is the root problem. It's a weakness in an agricultural system that's dependent on pesticides. But we set up systems to address that problem. If those systems can't work as effectively anymore because they've lost the resources and the institutional knowledge, that is also a big, important story.

Nature...uh...finds a way. It's just that next time, we might not get to be around to find out.

Resistance towards something without active pressure is quickly lost in populations due to the fitness cost of maintaining an unused resistance mechanism. The solution is sufficient rotation of pesticides.

We're able to feed the world's population today because scientists developed disease-resistant and high-yield varieties of wheat, rice, and other crops, and because scientists developed pesticides and fertilizers. To feed a growing population, particularly with the threat of plant diseases constantly mutating, we basically have to keep doing that scientific work forever.

Most of those scientists work for the private seed companies not the government. Sure they started from government research but they then turned those ideas into real seeds.

Again, burying the lede of the article which is about the last remaining pesticide that was effectively targeting the mite colonies. Six months of lost work is not the make or break for this, as this mite has been identified as a problem for at least a decade. This is a *treatment* of the mite problem, for which we have over a decade of research, proposed solutions, etc on.

That said: this mite problem is because of our industrial agricultural practices by bringing invasive species into the country to create a honey industry. The solutions to this are generally a combination of the below (at a high level):

1. Evolutionary arms race where scientists in academia and industry consistently try to find or invent new molecules that will harm nearly exclusively the mite, or perhaps genetically engineer a more resistant honeybee

2. Improve sterilization practices and protect existing swarms, and quickly identify mite infestations that could wipe the colony out.

3. Change of keeping practices to more accurately mimic nature, which is a challenge, because these bees are not native to the ecosystem, and native bees do not face these pressures because of a variety of reasons in the colony life-cycle.

This article is not about how impactful the "efficiency improvements" the government did by removing stability and the ability to plan long-term that occurred earlier this year. That was, at best, a drop in the bucket for this specific problem. You gotta stop looking at who is currently in charge when you're looking at a problem that initially was identified in 1987[0].

[0] - https://tsusinvasives.org/home/database/varroa-destructor

> Perhaps there's another organism that preys on these mites. Nature often provides the a cure with the poison.

Have we learned nothing from the old lady who swallowed the fly?