Sydney, June 29, 2022 – The lockdown per millions of bees in Australiawhere he landed for about a week the ‘varroa’ mite, their worst enemy. The threat looms over precious insects in the east of the country and, in addition to evident environmental damage (Albert Einstein said that if bees disappeared from the face of the earth, man would only have four years of life left), a slaughter of bees would have repercussions on the honey industry for millions of dollars, and even worse, on at least one-third of Australian food production, which depends on pollination, including almonds, apples and avocados.
The culprit is the ‘varroa destructor’, deadly parasite for small insects, discovered last week for the first time in a harbor near Sydney, and from there it soon reached at least 400 locations in New South Wales, within a radius of one hundred kilometers.
The alert is very high in Australia, also because Oceania was the only continent that had saved itself from the parasite, so the authorities ran for cover: each hive within 10 kilometers from haunted locations will be burned, and those within 25 kilometers, after an inspection, if healthy they will be monitored. For the rest, millions of bees, it will be a kind of lockdown: it has been established a biosecurity zone inside which hives, bees or combs cannot be moved until further notice.
Against measures that should be effective since the parasite can reproduce only in a colony of honey bees. The ‘varroa destructor’, the size of a sesame seed, attaches itself to the bee’s body and weakens it by sucking the hemolymph, and in this process transmitting lethal viruses. The parasitic syndrome caused by the mite known as varroatosi leads to the destruction of the hives in short, the varroa reproduce in a cycle of 10 days, and double with each cycle of the bees, soon the colony is infested. Madagascar is the only other place in the world that does not have the bee parasite.