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186 points pseudolus | 11 comments | | HN request time: 0.41s | source | bottom
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GeekyBear ◴[] No.44434645[source]
The standard practice for commercial crops is to bring in commercial hives of bees for pollination season that are shipped together via truck from crop to crop and region to region.

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.

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1. timr ◴[] No.44435195[source]
Varoa mites are incredibly hard to control. Back in undergrad I worked in a fruit fly lab, and we would periodically have outbreaks, despite being about the most isolated, sterile population of insects you can imagine.

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.

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2. GeekyBear ◴[] No.44435508[source]
> I doubt that there's any hope at all of controlling mites

I'm more interested in no longer spreading the mite gene(s) for pesticide immunity across the country.

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3. timr ◴[] No.44435618[source]
Well that’s easy: stop using miticide.

The resistance genes are not spreading due to physical transport, they’re spreading because of evolutionary selection.

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4. GeekyBear ◴[] No.44435886{3}[source]
I would say that the pesticide immunity genes arise because of evolutionary selection, but once they come into existance commercial beekeeping practices quickly spread those genes from hive to hive and across the country.
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5. ne0flex ◴[] No.44436297[source]
There's a company called, Greenlight Biosciences, that's developing an RNA-based pesticide for Varroa Mites. Last I spoke with the CEO, he mentioned positive results from trials.

https://www.greenlightbiosciences.com/in-the-pipeline-protec...

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6. timr ◴[] No.44436971{4}[source]
You might be right that the physical distribution plays a role, but the partial selective pressure of insecticide is like a resistance-generating machine -- as anyone who has tried to kill cockroaches will tell you.

Regardless, I think we both agree that the extremely unnatural pressures of industrial agriculture are a root cause here.

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7. GeekyBear ◴[] No.44437142{5}[source]
Certainly.

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.

8. timr ◴[] No.44437945[source]
That's cool, in a "better living through chemistry", 1950s man-in-a-white-labcoat sort of way. But when it comes to this stuff, I tend to be a bit like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: they're so focused on whether they could, that they never considered if they should.

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.

9. shellfishgene ◴[] No.44438244[source]
> miticides (which are insecticides, btw Mites are not insects, so miticides are not necessarily insecticides, no?
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10. andsoitis ◴[] No.44440485[source]
Correct, miticides and insecticides are both pesticides but mites are arachnids while insects are, well, insects.
11. timr ◴[] No.44447097[source]
Yes, mites are arachnids, but this point is pedantic. Miticides don't work by counting legs and body segments.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amitraz

[2] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Fluvalinate