This video is brought to
you by our fans on Patreon. What would happen if we stopped helping honeybees?
Would they disappear from the face of the Earth? What would happen to beekeepers around the globe?.
There is a rising Trend among beekeepers to let natural selection take its course in selecting
honeybees that are resistant to varroa mites, the biggest enemy of honeybees. Some people see
this approach as problematic because a significant amount of bees would die in a process and this
would result in many beekeepers losing their operations with huge consequences for our food
supply chain. Furthermore the process is not fast and could take decades to see the results.
Can science help to speed up this process? When I talk to beekeepers throughout North America
especially the ones with more experience it is clear to identify a sentiment of nostalgia
for the past. They miss the good old times as they like to say, when they didn't need
to be concerned about the honeybees Health all the time and could ultimately enjoy a
better life. Many beekeepers are considering quitting their jobs and I understand
why, it is no longer easy to keep bees. Currently in order to ensure the survival
of honeybees for pollination of our crops, beekeepers must invest a significant amount of
time and money and despite all these effort there are no guarantees of success. In my opinion the
modern beekeeping industry is facing a crisis. It is conflicted with two different beekeeping
philosophies. In this video I will explain this issue and I would love to know your thoughts on
that if it's possible. Since the introduction of the main beekeeping problems of the century
such as American foulbrood, tracheal mites, and the biggest enemy of honeybees of all times
the Varroa mites, Modern beekeeping industry has focused on finding solutions to fight these pests
a modern approach to beekeeping problems is to utilize all available resources to develop new
solutions for each specific issue, and this can take a form of new products and services and
protocols, especially since the introduction of varroa mites around 40 years ago a significant
efforts have been made to combat this pest. These effort have grown exponentially after emergency
of the colony collapse disorder in 2006 and boy we have a lot of things to help the honeybees
today. At the first glance the situation might seem promising however all the resources we've
invested so far have not only failed to solve the problem of controlling the varroa mite but
have also in my opinion snared the entire modern beekeeping industry. The problem is that these
new procedures and products have led to a greater dependence of chemicals for bees to survive like
mother honeybees as I like to call them are highly Reliant and on beekeepers for their survival
the more beekeepers fight to keep these bees alive the more they become trapped in a cycle
of dependence. On the other hand some places on a planet initially suffered from the introduction
of these pests, and because of the limit resources they had no choice but to let the bees die and
start fresh with the surviving bees. However these places are now perhaps beginning to react the
benefits of what was once considered a misfortune. Take a moment to think about that, there is
already bees in other parts of the world that produce quality honey with minimal interference
and as a result at a much lower cost. It's only a matter of time before these competitors to
grow, get stronger and get more powerful in a capitalist system. You can try to protect your
own Market with sanctions and other measures But ultimately it is inevitable that a cheaper high
quality product will prevail no matter what. Efforts to speed up the selection process of
resistant honeybees already exists and we know that honeybees with greater hygienic Behavior
can handle pests and diseases better including varroa mites. So I hit the road to see for myself
in the field with real beekeepers the performance of Dr Kaira Wagoner's research UBO, short for
unhealthy brood odor, is a new assay delevolped in her lab at the University of North Carolina
in Greensboro to help beekeepers select honeybees genetic stocks with higher hygienic behavior in
the hope that these bees will perform better with less use of Labor and pesticides. Essentially Dr
Wagoner isolate in a laboratory the orders of sick honeybee brood to identify honeybees triggered
by those compounds to perform hygienic Behavior. Making this a fantastic tool for beekeepers to
select bees with this highly desired genetic trait. I made a full video about this in the past
if you want to delve into the details Link in the description of this video. A group of beekeepers
is currently testing this new product in the field and I had the chance to follow one of them in the
state of Vermont the entire team was prepared and excited to test the hygienic Behavior capability
of several honeybee colonies during the test some team members opened the hives to find good frame
of brood while others sprayed the UBO compounds on the surface of the selected testing area the
device used it for spraying would likely be included with the product in the future once
the spring is done the frame is returned to the Colony and after two hours the amount of
uncapped brood is quantified. If the bees did not inspect the sprayed brood area it indicates
low hygienic behavior, on the other hand, if they open up some of the brood cells to inspect. It
shows more hygienic behavior compared with the previous scenario. However the true excitement
comes when a result like this occurs. Clearly demonstrating that these bees have strong hygienic
behavior and therefore are more capable to deal with diseases by themselves and can be used for
queen breathing. So a few years ago we started to leverage The Diagnostic lab at the uvmb lab to
start helping bee breeders to help them better select hardier more Pest and pathogen resistant
stock that's local to our environment here in Vermont so we started off working with Mike
Palmer of french hill Apiaries and providing field and lab support doing monthly varroa nozeem
accounts we did some virus assays for him also and we started doing freeze kill brood assays as
well to help identify some hygienic behavior and then last year we started collaborating with Kara
Wagoner of University of North Carolina Greensboro because she started to develop this UBO assay the
unhealthy brewed odor assay that does a better job of identifying hygienic stock for beekeepers
it expanded to now not just helping Mike Palmer French Hills Apiaries, Andrew Munkres as well
at Lemon Fair honey works and also Jack Rath here at Hundread Acre Wood Aviary and it's expanding
to other bee breeders as well so it's been a really awesome way to get these bee breeders
kind of working together the B lab helping to support their efforts in in selecting for more
hygienic disease and pest resistant resistant bees Jack, Why do you think this is going
to be important for beekeepers? Well I firmly believe that Varroa is the biggest
challenge that we're facing and I think that just trying to find the next chemical that's going
to manage it is not going to work in the long run and I think that we have to do all that we can to
help bees fight on their own and this UBO assay is identifying perhaps a different trait than the
freeze killed brood assay I had done some of that um two years ago and used it selecting my breeders
it was quite interesting seeing how the stock from the best of the freeze kill did on the ubosa and
there's certainly some correlation the high freeze killed responsive lines do better with the ubo
I do play around a little bit with instrumental insemination and the idea of being able to combine
these traits and combine these lines with this demo insemination is is pretty exciting and to
see whether we can kind of concentrate the trait in in some lines so later on in the season we're
going to be doing some grooming essays we're going to be using screen bottom boards and looking
at Mite drops and examining those mites for any injuries that the bees might have
caused an indicator of grooming behavior on bees and later we're going to see
if we can cross bees that are high performing groomers with high UBO performing bees and we're
going to be using our instrumental insemination for that as well and then this year we're also
looking at the heritability of the ubo trait in both open mated systems and instrumentally
inseminated systems so we're going to be following Daughters of high ubo that are either
instrumentally inseminated or open-mated and seeing how those perform and how much of the ubo
trait gets lost after a generation and it's pretty exciting to have more than one trait that we're
looking for because I think that if you're using one test you're limiting the B's ability you're
only selecting for those that do one thing which I think unnecessarily shrinks your genetic basis you
know these have lots of different strengths and I don't want to tell them how to control mites
I just want them to do it yeah and using as many different methods as as possible I kept these
before varroa and it was really different yeah you put Donnie supers on in the spring you took them
off in the fall that's it and you kept expanding because you couldn't help it and it's it's
definitely different now and I feel especially for the beginners that you know start doing this
because they're excited they want to help the bees they want to help the environment and they
didn't need to know that they needed to become pest monitors and I don't think that'll go
away but I think we can improve it that's the hope. This conflict between two different
beekeeping philosophies is very interesting and I will follow this along closely. To be honest
I'm not sure what's the best course of action here should we continue to fight and intervene
as much as possible to keep the system running or should we step back and let
the bees figure things out by themselves or, there is a middle ground where science can assist
the bees in helping themselves what do you think? It is a complicated subject but it's encouraging to
see scientists getting involved in bringing potential solutions to the table I'm very excited
to see what the future holds so what what have we done? [Music] Please, leave a comment section below and if you
have some extra time watch this video right here to learn more about bees, and if you want to
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