Some potentially seriously good news there if it all pans out the way it sounds like it might. Fingers crossed for the bees!

▲

shevy-java 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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

▲

EdwardDiego 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Then all the scientists who study apiary are wrong and someone in the HN comments knows better than all of them.

Congratulations, I look forward to your Nobel prize.

	▲	thin_carapace 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		while mites are evidently the ultimate cause of bee death in this scenario, i implicate humans due to their widespread enabling of mite destruction. https://academic.oup.com/jinsectscience/article/24/3/20/7683...

▲

fodkodrasz 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nah, it cannot happen that Big Agro's poisons are to fault...

▲

niksmather 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Pesticides are bad for bees, but Varroa is too. Until Varroa arrived in Australia the bees there didn't suffer from colony collapse, despite high pesticide use.

▲

EdwardDiego 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Big Ag was already using those poisons before varroa, so if it was the cause, you would've seen it manifest before varroa.

	▲	somenameforme 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It seems that varroa were first discovered in North America in 1987. [1] Glyphosate use at that time was around 4,500 metric tons. By 2014 we were up to 125,000 metric tons [2]. There was an exponential increase coming after 1996 when glyphosate resistant GMO crops became a thing. I don't have an opinion on this topic one way or the other, but there seem to be quite a lot of negative correlates since then, and this is just another one. Of course correlation doesn't mean causation, but you can't completely dismiss it. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa [2] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5044953/