[shevy-java]

No. The mites are not what is killing the bees.

And, by the way - natural pathogens exist in just about any population. These very, very rarely led to extinction. There is a media trend to claim the mites are at fault. This reminds me of prior fault yielding e. g. "mad cow disease" - and then the media also stopped doing any further investigation at that point. It's as if they have break points where you can not go past those points. Now it is the mites that get blamed.

[MrLeap]

Lotta unsubstantiated claims you're making there.

[bobmcnamara]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations

[kelseyfrog]

The negative government prior is unusually attractive.

[wizzwizz4]

People who believe these types of things tend to get their information from the same places. Which podcasts do you listen to?

[mrweasel]

There is a valid point though. All types of insects are in decline, but the decline in bees is exclusively due to varroa? It's not unreasonable to assume that at least part of the decline in bees is due to the same conditions that results in less butterflies, beetles, dragonflies and so on.

The removal of habitats suitable to insects and modern farming certainly plays a part as well.

Honeybees deal fairly well with pesticides, wild bees doesn't[1], but none of them can deal with losing habitats.

1) https://www.biavl.dk/medlemmer/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Bi... (In Danish).

[wizzwizz4]

You can interpret what is being said charitably, as some true claims surrounded by nonsense. However, this says more about your model of the world than it does about the intentions or beliefs of the author. The phrasing and the argument structure suggests that to me this is the same belief cluster that supports COVID denialism and the idea that it is possible (perhaps desirable) to evolve immunity to arbitrary diseases via a "natural selection" let-the-weak-die eugenics.

Your response is analogous to how people project onto vapid AI slop meaning which was not present in the process used to generate it. The primary difference being that there is a true meaning behind these words, something against which we can compare your reading. (I would like very much for your reading to turn out to be closer than my reading to what shevy-java intended to say, but I do not expect it.)

[lostlogin]

Do you keep bees?

If you control the varroa, the viral load and diseases burden goes way way down. It’s a basic fact of beekeeping, but sadly hard to achieve.