After more than a decade in the industry, beekeeper Liana Teigen Moreno thought she knew what she was doing when it came to making honey. Her experience at the University of Florida’s Bee Research Laboratory in Gainesville taught her everything she needed to know about bee diseases, wisdom that came in a convenient delay last year when she learned that an insidious parasite she had first learned in school as a part-time beekeeper had decimated her hives. despite their most productive efforts. ” I didn’t think I was immune, but I had become a bit arrogant,” he admits.
U. S. beekeepers have lost nearly a portion of their controlled bee colonies this year, according to an annual bee survey released June 22 through the nonprofit research organization Bee Informed Partnership. Nearly a third of the topple and vegetables Americans eat, from blueberries to strawberries, peaches, melons and cucumbers.
When it comes to farm animals, domesticated bees are just as vital to the US food source as cows, chickens and pigs, but losses continue to mount. This year’s 48% annual loss, which covers the 2022-23 winter season, is up from 2021-22’s 39%, and nearly on par with 2020-21’s 50. 8% mortality rate, the worst since the survey began in 2008. change, insecticides Overburdened crops and declining wild plant biodiversity play a role in bee colony deaths, but the biggest risk is Array varroa destructor, a mite invasive parasite smaller than the head of a pin that nonetheless exacts a heavy toll from the bees it feeds on. Varroa mites have been a pest to beekeepers since they arrived in the United States from Asian bees in the mid-1980s, but in recent years commercially available remedies have lost their effectiveness, even as the burden increases. mite virus. “Varroa mites are the number one risk,” says Teigen. “It’s something beekeepers have been fighting for for years, and to be honest, it’s starting to seem a bit like a hopeless battle. Really, what we want to turn the tide on is more equipment in our tool belt.
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A new tool is in the works: Boston-based biotech company Greenlight Biosciences has developed an RNA-based mite remedy for hives that uses a generation similar to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Only in this case, RNA is used to suppress a protein. important for the reproductive system of the Varroa mite, rather than creating a dummy protein designed to initiate the human immune response. If DNA is the style at the center of the mobile progression of every species on earth, RNA is the cement mixer that creates traditional protein building blocks. Each RNA formula is uniquely designed that only works on one target: a precision strike compared to the incendiary bomb of a broad-spectrum pesticide, which can cause collateral damage in other favorable insects.
Still in its infancy, this RNA-based generation heralds a new revolution in disease and pest prevention across the agricultural spectrum, from botrytis affecting blueberries and grapes with a hairy gray mold to the Colorado potato beetle and fall armyworm ravaging northern American crops. America to southern Africaand even mites that suck the sap of unusual indoor plants. RNA manipulation has the potential to become a new, resistant tool for treating some of agriculture’s most pernicious pests, says Andrey Zarur, who co-founded Greenlight Biosciences in 2009, with the purpose of locating biological responses to the overuse of chemicals such as pesticides, herbicides and fungicides in the global food system. “RNA will be as revolutionary to our food source as it has already been to human fitness thanks to COVID vaccines. “
Unlike their wild pollinator cousins, honey bees are not endangered. When a bee breeder like Teigen loses part of his colonies, he builds new ones by dividing what is left and replenishing them with young queens, who will lay thousands of eggs for their new colonies. Hives. But the procedure is time- and labor-intensive, and that means decreasing honey production as well as pollination services. as catastrophic. These days, you’re satisfied if you can keep it below 40%, and splitting hives is a must-have component of your annual workload, split between pollination gigs and honey production. “Before, the only thing I cared about was black bears,” he says, his voice choked from southern Georgia. “Those are mites I can’t even see without my readers. “
Modern agriculture would not exist without the fashionable stay. Of the 100 crops that account for 90 percent of the world’s food supply, 71 are pollinated by bees, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Take, for example, California’s $5 billion almond crop. For six weeks, starting each February, 1. 35 million acres of almond trees bloomed. Like avocado, apple and peach trees, their pollen is too heavy to be carried by the wind and therefore they will have to be pollinated through insects to produce nuts. But decades of commercial monoculture, combined with extensive use of pesticides to keep those staple crops healthy, have decimated local pollinators. To do the task, beekeepers from all corners of the U. S. .
Beekeeconsistent withs earn about $200 consistent with hive for their efforts, more than they would ever earn generating honey, but it comes at a cost. Billions of bees buzzing around a small domain are a pathogenic playground. “It’s like a cesspool,” says Hart, who goes there every year. “All the bees, from the rear to the most sensitive, are there. You don’t know who your bees are sitting with, what kind of viruses they have, and if they have mites.
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After stops in North Dakota for pollination of alfalfa and Florida for oranges, among other crops, Hart brings his bees back to Georgia to harvest their honey and prepare for winter. At that time, the mite population, acquired in the almond orchards of California, increased exponentially. The varroa mite is not a tick, but acts as such, jumping from one bee to another, sinking its barbed cord tongue into the torso and feeding on hemolymph, the blood bug. On a human scale, Teigen says, it would be like having a tick the length of a sewer rat sucking your gut.
In an adult bee, an adult varroa is a nuisance and a viral vector. In the wax-walled brood mobiles of the hive, where nurse bees care for the next generation, it’s a population bomb. Varroa mites reproduce when a pregnant mite, hitchhiking into the hive on the torso of an adult bee, sneaks into a brood mobile housing a bee larva. Worker bees fill the mobile with brood food, a protein-rich mixture of honey and pollen designed to nourish the hatching pupa, and cover it with wax until the bee is fit to emerge. During this time, the female varroa goes to work, depositing her offspring in the mobile and feeding on the hatching bee larva. The young of the mite mate, and when the adult bee is in a position to emerge from its mobile, it weakens due to loss of nutrients and carries a new cohort of gravid varroa mites in a position to “spread intelligence”. news,” Teigen said. “As sublime and lovely as a honey bee colony is, varroa mites come in and weaponize it. As beekeepers, we need to keep bees, but we also end up keeping mites.
Many young bees emerge flightless, afflicted with deformed wings, carrying viruses, and so exhausted that they cannot fulfill their number one function of caring for the next generation of young brood. In this way, a probably healthy hive can collapse in as little as a few weeks. Beekeepers have access to multiple products designed for mites in hives, from the red tape sprayed with formic and oxalic acids that will need to be deployed while clad in protective gear, to the strong insecticides and acaricides that render the resulting honey unsaleable. for its poisonous waste. The challenge is that both types of remedies harm the bees and become less and less effective against the mites. When Teigen saw the devastation of the mites in his own hives despite previous programs of the same old remedies of his, he overreacted, seeking other formulas that ended up killing as many bees as he saved. “Taking care of my bees is a mandatory evil,” she says. “But a lot of times I feel like I’m just folding my hands and hoping it’s not too strong or the queen doesn’t accidentally die in the process. “
Hart, who used to treat his bees twice a year against dust mites, now wants to increase the frequency, cancel his strict pollination program and further reduce his honey production. In the business, we’re going to have to do something else, because the mites are getting in and killing,” he says.
This other thing is unlike anything Hart has noticed before, at least not until Greenlight approached him and offered to try his new mite remedy in some of his colonies. Instead of an aerosol or vapor, Greenlight’s version, which doesn’t yet have an industry call because it’s still under regulatory review at the Environmental Protection Agency, looks like a white padded envelope filled with syrup. One side is pierced, and when placed in a hive, the RNA-laden sugar solution flows into the honeycomb, where nurse bees take it to feed their young, watering the mites hiding in the cells. Because RNA is designed to suppress a unique protein necessary for varroa mite development, it has no effect on bees.
If varroa mites militarize the elegance of the bee replica for their own reproductive purposes, Greenlight’s RNA solution militarizes this militarization by impeding the reproductive cycle in its tracks. “If they can provide strong evidence that it works, that it has no side effects, and that it’s effective in the box at low cost to the beekeeper, that’s precisely what beekeepers need,” says Nathalie Steinhauer, clinical coordinator at the Bee Informed Partnership, which administers the annual colony loss survey. “If anything, it’s smart to have a new [option], so we don’t have to rely as much on the few existing remedies that are already gaining resistance in varroa mites. “
Eli Powell, microbiologist, University of Texas, Nancy A. Moran Research and Lab Group in Austin, which focuses on insect and bacterial genomics, calls Greenlight’s RNA solution “positive. “We want new concepts to combat many of those disorders that bees face. . At Moran Lab, he and his colleagues developed an RNA solution that attacks another bee pathogen called nosema. technology. ” I don’t see anything expanding yet in terms of those kinds of approaches,” he says.
When Hart first tried the remedy in a Greenlight trial two years ago, he had doubts. How could something that wasn’t even designed to kill mites work?But the contraceptive effect soon became apparent. In a matter of weeks, you can tell just by lifting a lid which hives have been treated and which have received a placebo. “Because by the end of the test, most of them would be dead. The others will be completely satisfied and healthy. “
Teigen is recently testing the miticide Greenlight on nucs, mini-colonies designed to rear queens, to make sure it doesn’t have a negative effect. A queen will mate with dozens of drones on her maiden flight, collecting sperm before returning to her hive to lay eggs for her entire life. If she has good friends, she will have enough sperm to last her for a few years. But if she runs out or doesn’t mate at all, her hive will turn against her. It is imperative to ensure that the Greenlight remedy has no effect on her flight or her upcoming ability to lay eggs. After Teigen’s ill-fated delight in overtreating his bees last year with a not-unusual chemical miticide, she can’t wait to see a product on the market that does the job without harming his beloved bees. “Putting insecticide in a bug box to kill one bug, but not the other, seemed very counterintuitive,” she says. “Having something with much less involvement would be life changing, for me and my bees. ” (Although the RNA remedy has no effect on bee honey, neither Hart nor Teigen will sell the honey produced by the bees during the test, nor will they harvest the honey produced during a remedy. )
Greenlight is in the final stages of regulatory approval for its first RNA solution, designed to control the Colorado potato beetle, but its varroa remedy is still months away. The company submitted the solution for regulatory review to the EPA in February, and the procedure can take up to two years. But the sublime facet of RNA-based remedies is their versatility. Now that the company understands the varroa formula down to the individual protein level, it doesn’t take much to replace formulas to target other varroa proteins. Or even other mites for that matter. What can be useful. Another invasive mite, called Tropilaelaps, is already wreaking havoc among Asian and European hives and has recently been spotted on American soil. It reproduces at an even faster rate. At least until he finds a fragment of RNA named after him.