Difference between revisions of "Team:Toulouse/Collaboration"

The French-speaking meet-up took place in Bordeaux on the 29th and the 30th of August. Numerous teams were represented there: Bordeaux, Paris Saclay, Paris Pasteur, Leuven (Belgium), EPFL (Switzerland), Aix-Marseille and our own team.

On Sunday, the two parisian teams had prepared activities. Paris Pasteur was a survey related to their subject. Paris Saclay offered us to reflect on biosafety applied to our projects. They helped us identify the potential dangers in our project and how we could act on them. Each team was filmed explaining its sulution. You can find our own video here.

All in all this meet-up was a great chance to exchange and get to know other French-speaking teams. We would like to warmly thank the Bordeaux team for organizing it !

After some work on the project, we discovered that the team from METU High Schoul in Ankara was working on the same subject as us, the fight against Varroa destructor, a dangerous parasite of the honeybee. We had a Skype conversation with them about the way we could help each other out

Based on their idea we decided to create a survey to be spread through Turkey and France in order to have a better idea of the extent of beehives’ infestation by varroas. Below are presented the results of this survey.

We wish to underline the fact that in France there are few professional beekeepers, most of them are amateurs and own only a few hives. Thus there is no unity between these beekeepers, nor any syndicate. Hence the beekeepers that answered our survey were already interested in our project and aware of the problem caused by Varroa. We take this opportunity of thanking them for their participation and their help:
Matthieu Bourgeois, Michel Rives, François Sénéchal, Daniel Goubert, Lauras, Sébastien Bernard, Henri Martin, Marie Nadau, Michel Muller, Charlotte Bompard, Bruno Frémont, Gérard Corvée, Jean Rouquet.

As said previously, all beekeepers having answered the survey know about varroa and other ailments of the bees, such as American/European foulbrood, varroosis (caused by varroa), mycosis, chronic paralysis, nosema, sacced or chalk brood, deformed wings virus, colony collapse syndrome, acariosis or other dangers like the Asian hornet (a predator), pesticides or mold.

Some beekeepers believe they don’t have enough perspective to estimate this impact. Furthermore, since most of them are amateurs honey production is not their first object. They are more concerned about the welfare of bees as pollinators.

This being said, we can state that honey quality is not affected by most products since they are used after the harvest and have enough time to disappear from the hive before the following year’s harvest.

On the other hand, production is affected in the sense that an insufficiently treated beehive will have a population too small to effectively make honey. The size of the colony is linked to the harvest. If the queen lays a lot of eggs but varroas are numerous and weaken the new bees, the colony will weaken and will not be able to gather a lot of pollen to make honey.

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that most beekeepers told us they would be interested in a treatment against varroa that is efficient, ecological and respectful of the bees.

All the beekeepers who answered our questions were informed about our project and the logic of synthetic biology. Our participants were Prof. Dr. Ender Yarsan, Mehmet Erdogan, Kaan Keskin, Kursad Ceseroglu, Kursat Zeynel Utlu, Turabi Guney and Yasar Tekin. All of our seven beekeepers experienced the parasite: varroa. However, the beekeepers were wary at first and thought that our project could be more dangerous than useful and said that the drugs they use are enough to treat the hives.

We asked the beekeepers about the bee illnesses they knew of and these were their answers: lime, nosema, American foulbrood, European foulbrood, paralysis, septicemia, gravel and environmental illnesses. Being prepared and having reserves against varroa is an important issue for them, too.

The measures the beekeepers took as prevention against varroas were mostly of a chemical or biological kind, ranging from drug applications (organic or not), to chemical sprays and treatments.

Still they said that the preventions are not really enough. They prefer to use treatments such as Apivar, Bayvarol, Perizin and Checkmite+. However, the drugs used against varroa are imported and thus they are very expensive and difficult to acquire, beekeepers say. For instance the drug called APIGUARD is €28 and APILIFE is €40, which is quite expensive and difficult to reach for a beekeeper. Also the beekeepers complain about the drugs being inefficient.

To sum up, in both countries an important infestation of the beehives by Varroa Destructor was reported, resulting in a critical danger for the colonies and economical damage for the beekeepers. The Turk beekeepers seem to be more affected on an economical level than French beekeepers, but they are unanimous on the fact that the preventive measures they can use are of a limited efficiency and that even the chemical treatments are sometimes not sufficient to eradicate the parasite.

We can conclude from this that a solution that is more ecological and respectful of the bees would be very useful.

This survey was first created by the taiwanese team and integrated questions written by different teams. It was spread internationally and dealt with peoples’ vision of iGEM and of our project.