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Author Topic: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene  (Read 8902 times)

Offline Finski

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #20 on: May 24, 2013, 03:51:59 am »
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All those stuff about foundationless beekeeping. It is not my case..


Bailey, how mani months you have yield period. i have 4-5 weeks.

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« Last Edit: May 24, 2013, 04:04:59 am by Finski »
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Offline melliferal

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #21 on: May 24, 2013, 10:06:11 am »
I'm with you on foundationless, Finski.

As to VSH bees, I don't tend to consider them necessarily "treatment free".  Some will doubtless treat them that way; but contrarily I tend to think that VSH provides us more with bees that self-test for varroa.  No more need to do sugar rolls or alcohol samples; just look to see if the bees are opening capped brood and then you know by the percentage of uncapped brood how bad the infestation is.  And at a certain threshold, if it is your method, you can apply some kind of control of your choice. 

I'm particularly interested in how VSH bees might interact with drone frames.  Usually with these you put them in the hive, let the queen fill it with drone brood, and then take it out to freeze and kill all the mites.  But how would VSH work with this kind of control?  Perhaps you can leave the drone frame in the hive permanently; the VSH bees will do the work of killing the mites all by themselves.  It would be fun to experiment.
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Offline bailey

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #22 on: May 24, 2013, 10:39:30 am »
Finn
Your question just made my point.  We have a very different
Seasons here.   Your cold weather methods and observations
Might not translate so well to our area. 

I get months of flow.  Both spring and fall.
To compare 4 weeks to months doesn't work.

And to say that what you read here is 90% nonsense
Doesn't work either.
 Your k owledge of cold weather bee keeping
Is superior to mine i will stipulate That.

But does that mean we warm weather beeks are stupid?
most often i find my greatest source of stress to be OPS  ( other peoples stupidity )

It is better to keep ones mouth shut and be thought of as a fool than to open ones mouth and in so doing remove all doubt.

Offline JWChesnut

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #23 on: May 24, 2013, 11:01:35 am »
Finn, Bailey
Agree to a truce.  Finn has a "Language Barrier Included" tag, and his bluntness is just the way he expresses himself.  
I've been reading Finn's posts for years, and he is fighting an often lonely battle against fanciful, wishful thinking on Varroa.

Treatment-free is a legitimate option for keepers who have unlimited ability to restock nucs, and no economic constraints on the loss of hives.  It requires an isolation yard, so gene flow is not diluted from neighbor drones.  The Buckfast traits required decades to fix into the population in their isolated inbred yard in Dartmoor, so time and space is required.    The treatment free experiments I am familiar with locally are subsidized by university programs.  So a money backstop on the losses are also useful.     Treatment-free doesn't change the genotype if you are in an area with unlimited interloper drones.  Treatment-free won't "fix" bees in a year, so you need to commit to decades of work.

I'm refreshed by Finn's bluntness, don't take it personally, and bear in mind he does have to wade through some truely magical thinking by novice know-it-all keepers.

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #24 on: May 24, 2013, 11:10:00 am »
Finn, Bailey
Agree to a truce.....  

OR DON'T!...that's strictly up to the two of you.  :)

However, lets be honest, a little spirited back and forth is part of what makes this, and any other successful internet forum worth visiting!  :-D

Offline Finski

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #25 on: May 24, 2013, 11:27:49 am »
I'm with you on foundationless, Finski.


i thinked  over that old foundationless issue. It is too expencive treatment .

I renew 2-3 boxes combs per year and I use foundations. Langstroth box needs 10 waxsheets = 1 kg . One kg wax need 6-8 kg honey. I loose 15-20 kg honey per hive if I do not use foundations. I hive my old wax to foundation man and I pay 3.50 /kg.
15 kg honey is as money 100 euros.  

varroa treatment cost is about  1 euro per hive.

.with 20 hives I would loose 2000 euros to be "natural".

.that is 2600 US dollar ,.....to me is a big money for nothing.

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Offline 10framer

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #26 on: May 24, 2013, 11:31:45 am »
Finn, Bailey
Agree to a truce.  Finn has a "Language Barrier Included" tag, and his bluntness is just the way he expresses himself.  
I've been reading Finn's posts for years, and he is fighting an often lonely battle against fanciful, wishful thinking on Varroa.

Treatment-free is a legitimate option for keepers who have unlimited ability to restock nucs, and no economic constraints on the loss of hives.  It requires an isolation yard, so gene flow is not diluted from neighbor drones.  The Buckfast traits required decades to fix into the population in their isolated inbred yard in Dartmoor, so time and space is required.    The treatment free experiments I am familiar with locally are subsidized by university programs.  So a money backstop on the losses are also useful.     Treatment-free doesn't change the genotype if you are in an area with unlimited interloper drones.  Treatment-free won't "fix" bees in a year, so you need to commit to decades of work.

I'm refreshed by Finn's bluntness, don't take it personally, and bear in mind he does have to wade through some truely magical thinking by novice know-it-all keepers.

if you've been reading his posts you should know that these battles erupt pretty regularly.  let them fight it out if that's what they want to do.  i read both of their posts and i agree with most of what both of them say most of the time.  i think bailey does have a point in saying that beekeeping in the south is very different than cold weather beekeeping.  i'd say beekeeping in his area is much different than beekeeping in mine.  he's on the coast and i'm on the fall line.  he has a much longer season than i do.  but i've got a couple of good 3 to 4 week flows and a lot of secondary flows in a good year.  i have yet to see a varroa on any of my bees and there are a couple of guys nearby reporting the same.  in the 90's i never saw a hive that didn't have them.  there are a lot of treatment free beekeepers that manage to get a decent honey crop.  who can say that there is a 50 percent difference?  i have hives side by side that get the same treatment (none for now) that are very different when it comes to productivity.    

Offline Finski

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #27 on: May 24, 2013, 11:37:48 am »
I let the queen fill it with drone brood, and then take it out to freeze and kill all the mites. 

to put drone cells to freezer is a bad idea. Too laborous.
I put a medium foundatin to langstrot and then 1/3 is free space to draw drone combs.
I cut off the comb when it is capped. Bees draw quickly new combs.

Drone combs catch only one week mites, just the time when bees cap the larvae.
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Offline bailey

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #28 on: May 24, 2013, 11:45:02 am »
I will reflect the respect I'm given.   
And I have been very polite in my responses compared to
What I wished to write. 

But I don't take kindly to being discounted.  I'm not stupid.

And as a 25 year RN I believe I understand biology, disease processes,
Genetics, experimentation processes etc. 
And when I take up any project I research it to death so I can
Do things right.

So when I'm dismissed as a nonsense spouting moron I tend to set the record
Straight.   

You will not find me discounting others here as I have seen
The other party evolve into doing over the past year or so.
So a truce?   Sure.   
Soon as I see someone stop acting as if others are not his mental equal.
We more experienced beeks are here to help the new beeks and enjoy the conversation
With good friends. Not here to be talked down to and I am not one to stand and be
Insulted without response.   

There are great people on here with loads of good info. We should treat others here as friends and family.
Look at the videos of bud 5.   That's what we should find here.
That's what I'm here for anyway.

 
As far as language barrier.  I think if you review his posts he can clearly express himself well
Enough to be hypercritical!

most often i find my greatest source of stress to be OPS  ( other peoples stupidity )

It is better to keep ones mouth shut and be thought of as a fool than to open ones mouth and in so doing remove all doubt.

Offline JWChesnut

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #29 on: May 24, 2013, 12:16:06 pm »
The mathematics of genes
A complex behavioral trait, like VSH, is the expression of dozens of genes.  It is not a single gene turned on and off. The expression likely requires "homozygous recessive" or "rr" in at least some of these genes (as the trait appears infrequently in the wild).
For example, let's say VSH is linked to 10 genes.  Mendelian ratios say the expression of VSH will be seen 1/4*1/4....*1/4 of the time or 1 in 4^10 (4 to the 10th power) --  that is 1 in 1,048,576 colonies will have the proper gene expression.  Strictly mathematically, only about 3 of all kept colonies in the US would have the right expression (using the arbitrary 10 homozygous genes as the assumption).

Inbreeding the one-in-a-million colony, could fix the trait, so daughter clones would express the VSH.  Moved out to the wild, only  1 in 2^10 (or 1024) one-in-a-thousand colonies would have the trait in the F1 (second generation) if the dominant and recessive genes were equally present in the wild population of drones.  

A complication of bee biology is the wild mating with multiple drones, VSH would need to be frequent enough among the multiple fathers to make a difference in the hive biology and survival.

Unfortunately, inbreeding to fix a trait has the deleterious effect of fixing a lot of sub-lethal bad things in the geneotype.  Think Appalachia Cousin Marriage yielding six-toed cretins.  This "inbreeding depression" is compensated for by controlled out-breeding, and reselection of the desirable expression.  -- This is why traditional breeding programs are multi-decade efforts.

Remember that orchard crops are grafted clones, this is because the F1 of these trees in an even inbred cross are a mish-mash (or back to the one-in-a-million lottery expression of taste and color).    I don't know if grafted clones of bees are possible in a lab setting (drones are haploid or 1/2 of the queen's genes, so would be a resorted mix of her pairs of chromosomes).

The F1- one-in-a-million- lottery and the inbreeding depression cost is controlled in plant breeding by hybrid selection.  In hybrids, specialized parent strains that are infertile are maintained.  The  mother cannot produce (pollen) and the father won't set seed.  Mothers can be chemically, manually, or in some cases genetically sterilized from producing pollen (aka Drones in a bee metaphor).  The father/pollen/drone strain is a separate genotype that adds back just enough other traits to compensate for the weaknesses of the mother genotype. In plants, many hybrids are F2, parents are used to produce F1, which are then crossed to a second generation with the proper combination of traits.  I realistically don't see how a hybrid selection model would work for bees as  the selection and maintenance of non-productive parent colonies seems out of reach practically.

Offline Finski

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #30 on: May 24, 2013, 12:18:12 pm »
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Thanks to language barrier.

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Offline melliferal

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #31 on: May 24, 2013, 12:37:54 pm »

to put drone cells to freezer is a bad idea. Too laborous.
I put a medium foundatin to langstrot and then 1/3 is free space to draw drone combs.
I cut off the comb when it is capped. Bees draw quickly new combs.

Drone combs catch only one week mites, just the time when bees cap the larvae.

This is what I mean - it is a lot of work.  It's why I am interested in VSH.  The VSH trait is that the bees detect varroa nymphs in the capped brood and uncap it, pulling out and disposing of the pupa and attached mite nymphs.  If they do this on the drone frame, then it will be little or no labor for me; the bees will detect the mites, remove them, and then the queen will lay in the drone frame again immediately without having to draw any new comb.

It will not destroy all mites in any hive; but it may destroy a great many.  I'd like to experiment a bit.
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Offline Finski

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #32 on: May 24, 2013, 04:27:05 pm »
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I have studied genetics in university. i know something about these things.

If I get varroa tolerant bees, I amvery pleased. but I do not know where they are so that I can trustonthem..

There is much humbug in this aea NZ qbee breeders made "break out" in the year 2007 but since then it has been silent around the project. They breed bees on Mercury Island. Origin is from Germany.


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Offline melliferal

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #33 on: May 24, 2013, 05:42:54 pm »
Yes, people have been claiming to have developed mite resistance in bees several times over the past number of years, and we should always be skeptical of any such claims.

The VSH strain in particular was not developed commercially, but by a US government laboratory dedicated to honey bee research.  The laboratory makes no claims about the bees' survivability against varroa mites; it has only described the special VSH behavior as it has been discovered observed, and releases the results of studies and experiments and its VSH program is ongoing.  It offers the queens for sale to breeders who want to participate in the breeding studies.
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Offline JWChesnut

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #34 on: May 24, 2013, 06:22:39 pm »
Finn,
That is what is cool about the Baton Rouge paper.  They have a really simple protocol (introducing infected fresh capped brood briefly) to get a quantitative estimate of VSH behavior.  The protocol could be copied by anyone, since it consists of counting cells.

You could have a hunch on VSH in one of your hives, test for it, and make nucs like crazy from the good hive.  It really opens up the possibility of pushing the breeding cycle into high gear.

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If I get varroa tolerant bees, I am very pleased. but I do not know where they are so that I can trust on them.


Offline Finski

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #35 on: May 24, 2013, 06:33:02 pm »
Finn,

You could have a hunch on VSH in one of your hives, test for it, and make nucs like crazy from the good hive.  It really opens up the possibility of pushing the breeding cycle into high gear.

get a life!

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Offline Finski

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #36 on: May 24, 2013, 06:52:20 pm »

I've been reading Finn's posts for years, and he is fighting an often lonely battle against fanciful, wishful thinking on Varroa.

Treatment-free is a legitimate option for keepers who have unlimited ability to restock nucs, and no economic constraints on the los
I'm refreshed by Finn's bluntness, don't take it personally, and bear in mind he does have to wade through some truely magical thinking by novice know-it-all keepers.

i have only told, what has been researched in Europe. The work has been done by European Varro Group.
It was real researching in years  1998-2006. And you say it wishfllthinking.

10 years late Canada accepted these "wishfull thinking " as a varroa treatment concept.

And what USA did, researchers started to repeat  same researches what had allready done.
So USA comes 10 years after Europe and you are proudof it. All knowledgeis in Internet with your mother language.

i have not invented nothing of my own.

We have in Finland a guy who has breeded 10 years varroa tolerant bees. He has killed every year 100 hives for  varroa. He has used only his own money.

And I shoud sacrifice my life to those "do nothing guys".

Counting mites andloosing money what I do not have.

Get a life, donothingguys and concentrate to produce honey.
I have 25 litre formic acid and use it.
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Offline bailey

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #37 on: May 24, 2013, 08:16:30 pm »
Hummm.  Get.... A.....life....?????

Ok.  I did that years ago. 

Fin. Your being rude and intolerant.

This is a good forum. These are great guys. They are like family to me. 

No one has personally attacked you or your knowledge.  Yet you continue to attack anyone who doesn't bow down to the Finnish bee god!!!!

Why are you doing this?   No one has attacked you.  Yet over the past year or two your attacks and better than
Everyone else attitude has grown and grown to the point that your knowledge is being overshadowed by
Your rude and intolerant rantings.   

It is not very attractive at all and personally its becoming quite annoying. 

As far as a language barrier goes you seem to understand good enough to be an insulting ass.
So I for one am done with cutting you slack on that issue.

Why don't you deal with mites and disease and bee keeping in your own way that works for you and then shut the hell up when you want to discount others who apparently seem to be doing pretty good on their own?

I'm sure I'm going to get a stern reprimand from the moderator for what I'm saying and I'm willing to be banned for a while to make the following point. 

You don't have to be an ass to have your knowledge heard!!!!!!!!!
Let people ( especially the newbees ) decide for them selves without browbeating them or the knowledge
Of others. 

Stop using the " language barrier" as an excuse for your behavior.
Or go find another place to practice you method of instruction.   

The intelligent people here can decide which method is best for them. 

Without someone kicking them to make themselves feel more important in the universe. 
You understand?? Or should I go find a translation software app for you so you can?
Language barrier ain't going to cut it any more.
Good manners are a universal thing. Not just limited to English speaking countries.
Learn some common courtesy please!!!!

Bailey

Sorry mr moderator.
most often i find my greatest source of stress to be OPS  ( other peoples stupidity )

It is better to keep ones mouth shut and be thought of as a fool than to open ones mouth and in so doing remove all doubt.

Offline gov1623

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #38 on: May 24, 2013, 10:54:42 pm »
GO GET EM BAILEY  :shock: :shock: :shock:!!!!!!!
Who Dat!!!

Moots

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Re: Varroa Sensitive Hygiene
« Reply #39 on: May 25, 2013, 12:36:54 am »
GO GET EM BAILEY  :shock: :shock: :shock:!!!!!!!

+1  :-D