James' World 2

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Sammy Ramsey was having a hard time getting information. It was 2019, and he was in Thailand, researching parasites that kill bees. But Ramsey was struggling to get one particular Thai beekeeper to talk to him. In nearby bee yards, Ramsey had seen hives overrun with pale, ticklike creatures, each one smaller than a sharpened pencil point, scuttling at ludicrous speed. For each parasite on the hive surface, there were exponentially more hidden from view inside, feasting on developing bees. But this quiet beekeeper’s colonies were healthy. Ramsey, an entomologist, wanted to know why.

The tiny parasites were a honeybee pest from Asia called tropilaelaps mites—tropi mites for short. In 2024, their presence was confirmed in Europe for the first time, and scientists are certain the mites will soon appear in the Americas. They can cause an epic collapse of honeybee populations that could devastate farms across the continent. Honeybees are essential agricultural workers. Trucked by their keepers from field to field, they help farmers grow more than 130 crops—from nuts to fruits to vegetables to alfalfa hay for cattle—worth more than $15 billion annually. If tropi mites kill those bees, the damage to the farm economy would be staggering.

Other countries have already felt the effects of the mite. The parasites blazed a murderous path through Southeast Asia and India in the 1960s and 1970s. Because crops are smaller and more diverse there than in giant American farms, the economic effects of the mite were felt mainly by beekeepers, who experienced massive colony losses soon after tropilaelaps arrived. The parasite spread through northern Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and Central Asia. And now Europe. That sighting sounded alarms on this side of the Atlantic because the ocean won’t serve as a barrier for long. Mites can stow away on ships, on smuggled or imported bees. “The acceleration of the tropi mite’s spread has become so clear that no one can deny it’s gunning for us,” said Ramsey, now an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, on the Beekeeping Today podcast in 2023.

Ramsey, who is small and energetic like the creatures he studies, had traveled to Thailand in 2019 to gather information on techniques that the country’s beekeepers, who had lived with the mite for decades, were using to keep their bees alive. But the silent keeper he was interviewing was reluctant to share. Maybe the man feared this nosy foreigner would give away his beekeeping secrets—Ramsey didn’t know.

But then the keeper’s son tapped his father on the shoulder. “I think that’s Black Thai,” he said, pointing at Ramsey. On his phone, the young man pulled up a video that showed Ramsey’s YouTube alter ego, “Black Thai,” singing a Thai pop song with a gospel lilt. Ramsey, who is Black—and “a scientist, a Christian, queer, a singer,” he says—had taught himself the language by binging Thai movies and music videos. Now that unusual hobby was coming in handy.

Without bees, the almond yield drops drastically. Other foods, such as apples, cherries, blueberries, and some pit fruits and vine fruits, are similarly dependent on bee pollination.

The reticent keeper started to speak. “His face lit up,” Ramsey recalls. “He got really talkative.” The keeper described, in detail, the technique he was using to keep mite populations down. It involved an industrial version of a caustic acid naturally produced by ants. Ramsey thinks the substance might be a worldwide key to fighting the mite, a menace that is both tiny and colossal at the same time.

Ramsey first saw a tropilaelaps mite in 2017, also in Thailand. He had traveled there to study another damaging parasite of honeybees, the aptly named Varroa destructor mites. But when he opened his first hive, he instead saw the stunning effect of tropilaelaps. Stunted bees were crawling across the hive frames, and the next-generation brood of cocooned pupae were staring out of their hexagonal cells in the hive with purple-pigmented eyes, exposed to the elements after their infested cell caps had been chewed away by nurse bees in a frenzy to defend the colony. At the hive entrances, bees were trembling on the ground or wandering in drunken circles. Their wings and legs were deformed, abdomens misshapen, and their bodies had a greasy sheen where hairs had worn off. The colony was doomed. “I was told there was no saving that one,” Ramsey says. He had never seen anything like it.

When he got home, he started reading up on the mites. There was not much to read. Somewhere in Southeast Asia in the middle of the last century, two of four known species of tropilaelaps (Tropilaelaps mercedesae and T. clareae) had jumped to European honeybees from Apis dorsata, the giant honeybee with which it evolved in Asia. Parasites will not, in their natural settings, kill their hosts, “for the same reason you don’t want to burn your house down,” Ramsey said at a beekeeping conference in 2023. “You live there.”

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