African Bees Devastated by Mutant Clone Bees 33
a7244270 writes "Seems that the South African honey industry, as well as the plant life there that depends on bees for pollination, is under threat of destuction by some mutated, self cloning bees. This article in The Economist has the story."
Did I miss something? (Score:3, Interesting)
So these Cape bees just peacefully flit from flower to flower, eating to their little hearts' content, while the African Bees work their asses off and still end up getting annihilated. So much for the the grasshopper and the ant [umass.edu].
More info (Score:5, Interesting)
I once kept bees as a hobby....
I suppose one has to note that the "mutations" and "cloning" mentioned in the article is not human-induced. The Cape bee subspecies lived happily and successfully down in the southern part of South Africa (Cape provice). It had the Karoo, a semi-desert, as a physical barrier separating it from the African bee colonies further north.
The problems started when some bee keepers thought that the docile Cape bee might be easier to handle and moved some hives across the Karoo.
A bee hive is like a complex organism, where the queen bee is the reproductive center of attention and her pheromones are what makes the whole hive function.
Because the Cape worker bee gives off pheromones very similar to the African queen bee, they are (literally) treated like queens. Thus the Africa worker bees work themselves to death in sustaining multiple "queens" in their hive, while the Cape workers are spoilt rotten and never contribute anything to the hive - until the hive dies.
Harsh measures where taken since the 1990's to save the SA honey industry, inter alia destroying whole hives found to be infected. I'm surprised that this gets this sort of attention only now.
The conclusion in the article is probably right: high concentrations of hives (as in commercial beekeeping) are very susceptible to infection, while single wild hives could probably ward off infection more easily. This problem will probably only peter out once most hives are destroyed and the parasites with them. This doesn't bode well for the honey industry in SA.
Re:Useful in North America? (Score:3, Interesting)