Amitraz

But what's happened over the last few years, and why last year was the worst colony collapse ever, was that like many chemical pesticides, the Varroa built resistance to it.

And what's interesting is that, I think now I've seen six different genetic shifts that have happened around the world where it's called Amitraz, where it stopped working.

So it's not even like a single genetic shift has happened.

Depending on where the mite is in the world, its resilience to Amitraz is due to a different genetic shift.

OK.

So Amitraz was the main pesticide used for treating Varroa because at scale, it's just easier to use.

It doesn't take a lot of time and effort to deploy it, whereas the other treatments can't be used by commercial beekeeping.

So, that was part one, is the main product basically started to fail.

It's like blood and lymph fluid mixed together called hemolymph.

And so the mite sucks the hemolymph and passes a disease to 'em, and most commercial beekeepers treat for that with this miticide called Amitraz, but the mite has apparently evolved a resistance to the Amitraz.

So now the beekeepers don't really have a treatment for this very destructive mite parasite, and they're just losing their hives left and right, and that's the result of pollination-as-a-service business model.

M- mo- modern beekeepers generally have to have over 1,000 hives to make a living, and in order to make money with those thousand hives, they have to ship their bees to do pollination.

And we found that, I'm just putting this together, but we found that it collapsed.

I don't know if you guys have heard about Amatraz resistance, probably.

So it turned out that the Varroa was really high going into overwintering.

And all of those Varroa were resistant to Amatraz resistance.

And the beekeeper used Amatraz towels, so they didn't have any effect.

And these bees were also in watermelons where they sprayed neonicotinoids and apparently two different kinds of fungicides.

But we don't really know which ones they were using because we didn't run a chemical analysis.

And it does seem, and I'm happy if Agostina and Natalie kind of confirm, it does seem like there's been a bit of a more rapid shift.

There was probably a shift, and I'm thinking about resistance now, like Amitraz resistance.

I feel like this probably happened with like Fuvalvinate many years ago.

But from what I can recollect now, it does seem like over the last couple of years in terms of management, the beekeepers have had to do another major shift in an attempt to kind of keep up.

Uh, then there was a second incursion in Queensland, and this second incursion was a chemical-resistant mite.

And so the, uh, the normal chemicals that were being used, the Amitraz and, uh, Bayvarol and things like that, weren't working on these mites.

And, um, people had dropped their hives, they'd, you know, dropped three hundred hives off on a site or sites and come back two or three weeks later and all, and three hundred hives were dead.

And they were sl- scratching their head as to what's going on because they put the norm-- you know, like they were proceeding with the chemicals like they had done previously, and they just weren't working.