All My Parasites: The Fight Without a Quarter

Picture the scene: all of us bees lined up, like soldiers. In front, cheering the hive and first to chant the Maori dance of the AllBlacks, the New Zealand rugby team, is my brother Ruggero. I admit that, since attending the motivational counselling course with transcultural techniques, Ruggero has become a little strange, but I have described everything to you, verbatim, to make you understand that against certain lousy parasites we bees become fearless warriors. Unfortunately, our life is not just about strawberry trees and flowers.

There are plenty of enemies out there to fight. But does it seem to you that a damn mite had to come all the way from the island of Java on purpose to annoy us, make us more vulnerable to disease and endanger our hives? Yet it did: the varroa destructor decided that it had tired of the wonders of South-East Asia and travelled all the way to Europe. It has also been living in Italy for a long time and has put all of us bees on red alert. 'Quick, there's no more time to lose, scalpel! Ooops, I got confused, I must have watched too many episodes of Doctor House, E.R and company. What I meant to say was: quick, pass me the dropped oxalic acid!": so I heard, fluttering, from one of our beekeepers while talking to his partner. It was almost winter and there was no brood left.

I was spellbound watching them do a perfect cleaning treatment of the hive with this mixture of oxalic, water and sugar. They do not want to use chemicals because then you risk so-called drug resistance and they would no longer work, just like when you humans abuse antibiotics. In short, they cleaned everything well to prevent the mite from coming back, settling on our bodies and then breeding in the cells of our hive, where we grow the little bees. The bastard inside, in fact, lives as a parasite!

One day, it was the middle of summer, my best friend Asia started flying all crooked. I teased her, thinking that as usual she had overdone the mallow nectar. Instead, a female Varroa had mistaken her tegument for a feeding bottle, stuck to her like a mussel, I swear! Damn it, it had practically hatched with her, in her cell, and, after sucking her haemolymph, was just waiting to settle in a brood cell and lay its eggs. In fact, they now seem to take more interest in our fat bodies (although fat, I swear, we have nothing!).

And those Varroa leeches have seven lives like cats! That is, seven reproductive cycles. I still remember when I attended the funeral of a whole colony, close to mine, affected by varroasis. It was early spring, there was a crisp warmth in the air. My mother, the queen bee, gave a speech in honour of her dead friends. There was a great silence, interrupted only by sobs. Then, we all listened together to the notes of Candle in the wind by Elton John, like during Lady Diana's funeral. No!!!!I swear I'm not crying. I'm tough. I just got a petal in my eye... No more memories, I'm a born fighter and I never give up. Not even against the Galleria mellonella or wax moth, a family of butterflies as friendly as insecticides on flowers.

The number one enemy of honeycomb, they are widespread and present wherever hives are found, except in high altitude areas, because the cowries suffer from the cold. Their larvae feed on the combs, destroy them and contribute to the transmission of infectious diseases such as the American foulbrood. The larvae, as soon as the egg hatches, immediately look for a honeycomb to feed on and dig tunnels, growing to double their weight in ten days, greedy, fat buggers! To combat them, the best solution would be to keep the honeycombs at a temperature low enough to prevent the eggs from hatching, but this is only possible by storing them in a large refrigerator called a cold chamber.

Only beekeepers who work big have it, because it costs so much and not everyone is so rich. Fortunately, we have allied ourselves with the bacillus thurigiensis, discovered in Europe in 1911 and used for plant defence: a specific bacterial lineage has been selected from it for the fight against the gall. It is called B401 and is able to damage the intestinal walls of the larva, causing its death. In short, if we release B401... by by gallery!