3. Mite bee nasty

Varroa.  It looks like all the creepy bits of spiders, mites, crawly bugs and aliens combined into a tiny, phobia-inducing truncated, indestructible-looking flying saucer, with just a few extra (it seems to me just OTT) heeby-jeeby legs/arms/hairy mandibles coming out of its front looking like they'd surely grab you if you didn't know to stay well back.  It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't also look like it had no eyes at all.  Nasty, but you can't blame it for wanting to eat.

Varroa will wedge its invisible mouth between the chitinous segments of adult bees - right on the back of the thorax where the bee can't reach to get them -- and suck on their juices.  That's ugly enough but varroa's favourite food is not bee juice but larvae juice.  The little monster will run very nimbly along the hexagonal edges of the comb, dive into a cell containing a new larva, leave the nurse bees to cap it off with wax and then feed away in the darkness.  The larvae, drained of their nutriment, grow into deformed adults and it's strangely heartbreaking to watch their confused and broken bodies try to crawl out of their cells.

When varroa came to Britain, our bees were rubbish and didn't know what was wrong.  Although chemical treatments have been developed, they don't help the bees to help themselves.  Beekeeper and researcher Rodger Dewhurst has been trying to do just this and reckons that, if allowed to fend for themselves, British bees will become resistant to varroa.  In an article for The Ecologist, he warns against jumping straight for the chemicals:

‘[A] bee-breeder must be able to see how his or her bees perform naturally, always on guard in case treatment is needed.’

When Rodger's bees have been left to solve the problem alone they have, amazingly, started to learn how to deal with it by grooming and shaking each other to dislodge the mites, then catching and chewing them until they die.  The bees even hold their own impromptu grooming parties.  This is just amazing.  How on earth could they learn this behaviour?  It's just incredible to me.  In order to do so, they would have to have recognised that the mite was a problem, then somehow create/develop/accidently stumble upon multiple strategies to deal with it, then watch each other and improve their technique.  And a bee only has one cubic millimetre's worth of brain to achieve all this, although of course there is a strength in being wholly social creatures which can sort of 'think' together.

Here is a strangely compelling film of bees trying to dislodge their own varroa mites, presumably in a colony which has not yet learnt to deal with the problem socially.

• www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSGa9DKraGA

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