The Varroa Problem: Part 9 Knowing Thine Enemy
August 21, 2017
From: ScientificBeekeeping.com
Randy Oliver
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles”– Sun Tzu. We are all beekeepers; we are also all varroa keepers (some of us better at the latter than the former). Varroa is the enemy of both bees and beekeepers. It would behoove us to know the strengths—and more importantly the weaknesses—of our enemy.
Evolution
I well remember listening to a well-known extension apiarist and columnist [1] back in the early days of Apistan®, tell an audience that the invasion of varroa had been a “good thing” for the bee industry—it had driven all the poor beekeepers out of business, and knocked out competition for resources from the feral bee population. At that time, Apistan strips had made beekeeping easy again. Unfortunately, the speaker was failing to account for evolution. He would have done well to remember the words of Heraclitus (500 B.C.):
“There is nothing permanent except change.”
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