# Viruses



## Clayton Huestis (Jan 6, 2013)

Does anyone know if exposing very strong colonies to a virus load from failing colonies can give immunity after the viruses have been fought off? Example like a vaccination. Looking to learn more about honey bee viruses how to fight them to get resistant or inoculated stock. What is a current knowledge on how to fight honeybee viruses? Threw medication, nutrition, exposure to small virus loads, ect. Want current info on this?


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## orthoman (Feb 23, 2013)

Great question. And, I don't know the answer. 

I would think that your premise is also, more or less, the foundation or basis of treatment free beekeeping. It seems to me that other than the queen, the bees have nothing much to do with it as they don't pass on any direct genetics of their own and they don't live very long whether they fight off the virus or not.


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## NorthMaine (Oct 27, 2016)

I was going to say basically what Orthoman said, the bees can't pass on anything from mother to child like a human does, so no inoculated stock possible. Resistant is basically expose them all to the virus and let them die (don't treat), anything that is still alive is either lucky or resistant. I have images of Monsanto going out and spraying roundup on the crops over and over again to ensure anything that isn't compatible to die, leaving only the seeds that will work with roundup. If you did that with the bees, your beekeeping neighbors will be (unwittingly) working against you as they treat and contribute drones genetic material. Even if you succeed it will be lost in a generation as they make their next queen and mate with non resistant bees from the environment. 

Not sure you could make a hyperdermic needle small enough to vaccinate the bees, and I wouldn't want that job. "Have you had your shot? How about you? Stop moving! Hey, I'm giving the shots here, not you."


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## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

It may, could take years to develop resistance, it also might be gained by queens breeding among feral survivors; Selected by survival of the fittest. When the mites came it wiped out most of the wild bees only a fraction of percent were left to breed and repopulate. Now decades later we have the same amount of wild bees per square mile as we did before the mites. These feral survivor bees have both high tolerance to diseases and the ability to keep mite loads low.


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