https://sweetharvestfoods.com/the-commercial-honey-bee-trave...
That sounds like a great opportunity to spread the resistant parasites from hive to hive and region to region.
It might appear to be lush nature, but the places we farm are deserts in many ways. We kill insect life, birds, mammals, and other supporting species. We remove most of nutrients from the soil and replace them chemically. A commercial orchard might as well be an Amazon datacenter from an environmental standpoint.
If we want to change things, we need to fundamentally alter the way we grow food. It will be a bit harder -- we'll need regenerative methods, less reliable methods, more human labor, more weed prone, etc. -- but we can build food production into something that's much more sustainable and ecologically sound.
Some farmers are already doing this, or experimenting with it, and I think there's at the very least a growing soil health mindset among small farmers.
It is possible to have local beekeepers who don't ship their hives across the country, and there are still untended wild hives. Those seem to be in better shape.
I doubt that there's any hope at all of controlling mites in free-roaming honeybees. I'd wager that we've done damage with overuse of miticides (which are insecticides, btw -- the article doesn't connect those dots) in a misguided attempt to control nature.
Livestock is as GMO as they come, just on a longer scale.
im not providing anything to anyone. i live with this statement as a fact. i will not comment anymore in this discussion. be(e) free to downvote.
Fishing vessels are spreading parasites at hyper-accelerated speeds. This happens when they clean the guts of infected fish at sea without prior treatment and when they discard untargeted fish in the same way; The parasites disperse exponentially, within a loop, when such parasitised food spreads through the trophic. This has already happened on a planetary level.
Also, to note, I think that if they start droping frozen guts into the sea as a treatment, our main defensive barrier at home (to froze fish some days before consumption) will eventually disappear when the parasites adapt (ie. not freezing them long enough until they die due neglect, would progressively disperse freeze-resistant strains in the wild).
Many people don't realize that honeybees are not native to North America. Bringing them in massive numbers crowds out the native species and causes further ecosystem breakdown. It's good that people now understand that pollinators are important and insects need to be protected. But that means prioritizing the health of native species and creating a healthier ecosystem from the ground up (literally).
https://www.greenlightbiosciences.com/in-the-pipeline-protec...
It seems the baseline drifts and we could stand to take certain environmental cycles and/or livestock lifecycles for granted as though they exist purely through evolution or untouched ecological processes.
Have a few pigs rummaging around your food forest? Some sheep to keep grasses and weeds in check? Some poultry to remove pests and aerate the soil? Sure! Love that, it's using behaviors in complementary ways to create a healthier system.
Cram thousands of animals into cubes and process them with machinery? Truly awful in my view.
There isn't a reporting structure for hobbyists. Look down-thread for an example of a hobbyist who lost their hive (and whose neighbor lost their hive).
This isn't limited to big operators.
If it's a collapse it seems like a slow collapse.
Regardless, I think we both agree that the extremely unnatural pressures of industrial agriculture are a root cause here.
For example, Scandinavian countries that have made a concerted effort to only prescribe antibiotics to humans when they are medically necessary saw the genes for antibiotic resistance becoming less prevalent.
Unfortunately, America still allows agribusiness to feed livestock a constant stream of lower dose antibiotics, because doing so makes animals more efficient at turning feed into muscle.
Probably the better solution here is to stop trying to do industrial farming of bees, and move to a system where local populations of pollinators are cultivated and maintained year round. But sure, RNAi is probably better than the chemicals they're using now.
The genetic research seems to point to the opposite happening - that because of pressures on honey bees from pesticides or pests ( and thereby viral pressure carried by various pests ) the feral and commercial populations track quite closely.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8991 - there's a lot here specifically relevant to this discussion but especially note the emergence of African Honey Bee genotype in wild populations. This paper is from 2015 analyzing the biodiversity response to the arrival of V. destructor ( varroa mites ) and Africanized bees were introduced in the early 1990s as well.
The take-away is that until you have a 3 mile separation of water, assume that populations of bees in a land area are more related than not and face similar pressures in a given climate, whether feral or managed. Honey Bees especially ( but of course every living thing ) should be managed with an ecosystem mindset.
a) African honey bees aren't domesticated populations, challenging your overall point.
b) A 3 mile separation is not substantial (though I grant you that if most of the bees in any given cluster are introduced, then it might lead to more homogeneity).
c) even within "wild" populations of whatever, you see local clusters of genetic similarity. It's been a while since I took population genetics, but IIRC this kind of local equilibrium was well-covered.
Also, I haven't read the paper, but the abstract sure sounds like what I'm describing -- a sudden population bottleneck leads to rapid evolutionary adaptation in wild populations:
"These findings suggest that genetically diverse honey bee populations can recover from introduced diseases by evolving rapid tolerance, while maintaining much of the standing genetic variation."
Consider Amitraz [1]. It is both an insecticide and a miticide, and the method of action is on the central nervous system. Fluvalinate [2], another common one, is also broadly toxic to many different organisms.