Jessica Johnson
Special to Mustang Daily
“If the bee dies, everybody dies,” horticulture and crop science professor Scott Jeffreys said.
Beekeepers are desperate to keep bees alive, he said.
Cal Poly is fighting a battle with the varroa mite. Cal Poly uses new treatments for killing mites and continues research for protecting the bees.
The fight against the mites began in the 1970s, when scientists noticed a dramatic decline in the number of honeybees and a gradual decline in the number of colonies maintained by beekeepers, Scientific Magazine reported in 2006.
According to a November 2011 article “Back in bees-ness” in Mustang Daily, the dramatic die-off of bees is known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Bacterial infections caused by poor bee immune systems, harsh chemicals and even moving the bees around to pollinate other fields have been reasons for the occurrence of Colony Collapse Disorder, Jeffreys said.
The varroa mite is a disease-carrying parasite, Jeffreys said.
“The varroa mite vectors over 20 different viruses to the honeybees, and it is the viruses that end up beating the bees the most,” he said.
During the fall, the population of honeybees drops naturally as the days get shorter and the bees prepare for winter, he said.
At the same time that the bee population declines in the beehive, the varroa mite population starts to rise since there are fewer bees, it’s an inverse population curve, he said.
There is a 40 to 60 percent loss of the bee population per year and it is disappointing and discouraging to new bee keepers, he said.
Many people are allergic to bees and this makes them a fear among many individuals, he said.
Now that there is a decline in bees, people are starting to get more educated about them, he said.
“Bees are sort of the unwanted stepchild of agriculture and yet they touch one out of every three bites of food we eat,” he said.
Pollination and honey are the primary value that honeybees perform in agriculture, he said.
Cal Poly used a Hopguard, a varroa mite control, to control the mites in the beehives, but the state of California only has Hopguard used in the beehives for a year. Now that the year is over, a new varroa mite control called Apiguard is being used.
The control product this year is a plant based product called thymol, which is thyme based, he said.
The trade name of the control product is Apiguard, and it has beat back the mites pretty well, he said.
“We monitor the levels of mites using a powder sugar roll that measures the number of mites that fall off of one-half cup of bees rolled in a jar with one-half tablespoon of powdered sugar,” he said.
Keeping bees alive is an ongoing battle, he said.
The varroa mite is the primary issue in keeping honeybees alive through the winter at Cal Poly, but it is also an issue worldwide, he said.
Agricultural education and communication professor J. Scott Vernon said bees are hardworking partners in food production.
Bees are essential for moving pollen and they work hard to pollinate trees and plants, Vernon said. They produce fruit critical to the environment and food production.
“They are critical to our success in agriculture production,” he said.
Assistant professor of sustainable landscape horticulture Robert Shortell does plant protection sciences at Cal Poly, one of his research focuses for his own program is coming up with alternatives to pesticides, he said.
When Shortell saw the mites up close, he was sold to try his experimental product, he said. The mites were huge compared to the usual mites he works with.
The mites are smaller than the bee, but in the mite world, they’re considered big, he said.
Shortell asked Jeffreys to test an experimental product he came across that showed terrific results on different mites found on ornamental plants, Jeffreys said.
The tests turned out to be disappointing, he said.
“After putting out the product, we observed that it had no effect on the varroa mite at all,” he said.
One of the problems with the product is once it dries out, it’s not as effective, Shortell said.
The study will be run for 10 weeks to see what happens, Shortell said.
“Dr. Shortell is very impressed with how tough the varroa mite is,” Jeffreys said.