Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

I suppose honey bees are not native in North America pretty much the same way as the human species?

I don’t quite understand why there seems to be a pretty persistent thread around “honey bees are invasive and harm the ecosystem by stealing all the food from the native bees and doing all their pollination; that’s why they decline” - when at the same time the use of pesticides is so rampant that insects are literally gone entirely.

Honey bees are not great and reliable pollinators btw.

So the solution is: more genetically modified crops? More pesticides?

Unless “we need to stop our use of pesticides and we should also acknowledge that honey bees are an invasive species and consider making changes to the way we do monocultures” are in the same sentence this entire “honey bees are invasive” argument just feels super weird. Pesticides kill native pollinators. It’s not the honey bees.

Edit: and just to be clear - honey bees do not survive in the wild by themselves anymore due to varroa mites. They essentially depend on humans to protect them. That’s what the entire purpose of this article is about. So, if humans stopped keeping honey bees - they’d have a pretty hard time surviving in the wild on their own.

>>Honeybees are not native to North America.

Neither are horses.

I guess the issue is you don't get honey with the native bees.

You could pick up a catalog from any of these places and find half a dozen different species of bees to cultivate for pollination. Blue mason bees come to mind. Anything that's even slightly domesticatable is being pursued. Some of these bees are loners too, perfect for the hipster crowd.

If they are not native, how did plant propagate seeds? Flies? Wasps? Butterflies?

To add, varroa quickly gains immunity to the pharmaceutical treatment we have, so the same medication cannot be used 2 years in a row. Most popular treatment from late 90s that used to kill 99% of varroa is now completely ineffective.

It was explained to me this is well planned and solved in Czechia. Varroa treatment is refunded my the government, but only one type of medication every 6 months. It's cheaper for beekeepers to use whatever the government gives them for free, than use something else. And the medication is free only for a few weeks, so everyone will use it at the same time.

No. The mites are not what is killing the bees.

And, by the way - natural pathogens exist in just about any population. These very, very rarely led to extinction. There is a media trend to claim the mites are at fault. This reminds me of prior fault yielding e. g. "mad cow disease" - and then the media also stopped doing any further investigation at that point. It's as if they have break points where you can not go past those points. Now it is the mites that get blamed.

This assumes the mites are what kills the bees. What is that asssumption is flawed?

As article suggest - it is fully biodegradable. I suppose venom has some short half-life. And since peptide is isolated, not full chain toxin, it should be harmless to humans.

A lot of people might become allergic to honey, and never know why.

Probably, but not at any meaningful concentration.