Team:FAFU-CHINA/Practices
Q:What is the influence of CSBV to your bee population?
A:This disease outbroke seriously in my bee farm located in Wuyi Mountain. It began from April this year with high Infectiousness and spread fast and strong.This disease is so difficult to cure that it resulted in economic loss.
Q:How do you combat this disease based on past experience?
A:If this disease outbroke more serious in the past , then they could only be used some illicit chemicals to combat, such as oxytetracycline. Most of these drugs are expensive but the effect is good, so it has become a choice for traditional beekeepers. But now with the improvement of beekeeping technologies, as well as taking into account the impact of drugs on product quality .We seldom use the drugs.
Q: What were measures you taking to reduce the loss without drug treatment?
A: Because the disease first breaks out in the general body of the bee larvae but he impact on adult bees are relatively small. Therefore, in the early stages, the hive of pest is more difficult to find. When honeycomb occurrence of disease was more serious on a board , we only could dispose of the pests on that board to prevent the transmission to other bees to reduce losses.
Q: Our project is to create a gene medicine that can inhibit viral replication and add E. coli bacteria to the syrup to feed bees.It will use bees’ habits of feeding each other to achieve the effect of prevention and treatment of disease.Then we want to know whether the E. coli we add will have effects on honey quality and safety ?
A: Actually, unprocessed honey contains various active microbes, such as yeast, E. coli and other bacteria. So there is a specified index for honey products. But our production of honey bee is essentially non-pasteurized. First, because the honey itself contains a certain amount of lysozyme, it has a bactericidal effect. Second, the quality honey which is sterilized will decline. In addition, E. coli is not the dominant bacteria in honey, so basically you can not consider security issues.
Q: If we made gene medicine products, compared with traditional chemical drugs in the market what are our competitive advantages?
A: Your generic drugs can effectively treat CSBV and has small food safety risks to human as opposed to the traditional hazards of drugs on security issues. If it is put into the market, it will certainly have a incomparable advantages with other drugs. But you have to take into account the cost and the use of generic drugs. Because to the beekeepers, what they pursue are economic benefits. So if you can effectively solve these problems, it will be promising.
Q: How Chinese bee population develops in China how?
A: Nowadays most bees Chinese beekeepers raise are Italian bees. Because Italian honey bee produce high volume honeey and has relatively cheap price to have a higher economic efficiency. While the population of Chinese bees is relatively small and product less honey.So people seldom farm them.These factors slowly caused the population of Italian bee rapidly expanding.However, the relative reduction was in Chinese bees population.
