Hush of the hives

"THE sun, in genial humour peeping through the open door, gives to the long-imprisoned inmates assurance of kindlier, conditions without; and the beeman, watching for signs of survival, delights to see first one, and then other, and presently many of his little pets appear on the alighting board..."

An old Practical Bee Guide, wax-stained and crumbling at the margins, celebrates the spring awakening of the hives in the rhapsodic prose of the Rev Joseph Digges, of Leitrim, Ireland's best-selling apiarist (30,000 upwards) in the century's early decades. "A gladsome hour for the bee-man," he intones, "an infectious happiness."

In a less innocent age, the Republic's 2,00O beekeepers watch their little pets whizzing off to sample pussy-willow and flowering current with a gladsomeness tinged with apprehension. As varroa, the alien mite, cripples hive after hive of honey-bees throughout England and Wales - indeed, through much of the western world - how much longer can Ireland remain immune?

Varroa is a just-about-visible, blood-sucking mite related to spiders and scorpions. It is a specific natural parasite of the Asian honey-bee, Apis cerrana, which has its own natural defences against it the two insects having evolved in the same bioregion. Through movement of colonies and the trade in queen bees, the mite has spread to the European honey-bee Apis mellifera, which cannot cope with its attentions.

It latches on to both larval and adult bees, deforming or killing the first and crippling the second - the first pest to attack both stages. It feeds on the adult's blood and spreads viruses and dysentery through the colony. As the mites multiply into thousands during the summer the colony collapses, often within a few weeks. Neighbouring honey-bees, robbing the combs of the undefended hive, take varroa home with the honey.

Since 1970, the mite has spread throughout Europe. The first outbreak of "varoosis" in Britain was in 1992 and the disease is now found throughout England and Wales and is creeping into Scotland. In the 1980s it arrived in America - probably on honey-bee queens smuggled or - mailed in from Europe by some "improving" hobbyist.

In Ireland, there are about 23,000 honey-bee colonies in the Republic. It's the honey from blackberry, clover, hawthorn, sycamore, fruit trees, garden flowers that is the main reward of bee-keeping, and 20 kilos per hive per annum the average to be aimed at. Since the steady advance of varroa became obvious on the Continent, there has been a total embargo by the Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry on the importation of bees and queens - a ban solidly backed by the Federation of Irish Beekeepers' Associations. Last year, with the federation's help, Teagasc sampled 300 widely-separated colonies and found the mite in none of them.

It will of course, arrive eventually, defying all the characteristics of honey-bees that might prevent it - swarming bees don't fly very far, a bee with the wrong smell won't be allowed into a hive, and so on. It will be whisked in on a strong east wind when infected Welsh hives are swarming in summer, or be carried on in a weakened bee in the corner of a lorrydriver's cab. Nature thrives on such long odds.

Given three or four years, the offspring of just one fertilised female mite will reach the 5-10,000 mites it takes to cause colony death. Obviously that isn't happening yet on an overwhelming scale, even in the UK or Europe, or honey would be £20 a pot. But bee-keeping has now joined pig-farming, battery hens and other intensive husbandry in trying to keep stock tolerably healthy through chemicals and close management.

Finding pesticides that kill mites but not bees is not easy. Predictably, mites resistant to Apistan and Bayvaro (both synthetic pyrethroids

"no withdrawal period for honey") have already developed in Italy and - are spreading into Switzerland and France. There have been heavy colony losses when the chemicals no longer work, and even where they still do, good beekeepers have been caught out by the rapid spread and build-up of mite populations. The general thrust of varroa research is towards breeding a temperate, mite-tolerant bee. The biotechnologists might engineer one, of course, and then clone it, until the next disease comes along.

Meanwhile, Ireland's apiarists stay watchful, ready to send 30 dead bees in a match-box to Teagasc's varroa chap in Kinsealy.

This would not be the first mite-borne affliction of bees that beekeepers have seen. Acarine disease, caused by a mite which breeds in the air tubes of bees, was well known to the Rev. Digges. After 1904, it "devastated whole apiaries, ravaged and laid waste the domain of Beekeeping in every part of the Three Kingdoms, preserved its secrecy and anonymity for sixteen years ... "And they never have found a chemical cure.