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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Mushrooms could help save the world's bees - News - Tuscaloosa News - Tuscaloosa, AL
  • Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2018 22:55:44 -0400

https://www.tuscaloosanews.com/news/20181006/mushrooms-could-help-save-worlds-bees?template=ampart

Mushrooms could help save the world's bees
By Evan Bush The Seattle Times
Posted Oct 6, 2018 at 8:53 PM
Updated Oct 7, 2018 at 8:50 PM
Paul Stamets, a renowned expert on mushrooms, nurtures fungi near his home
in Shelton, Wash., in a 2010 file image. [John Lok/Seattle Times/TNS]▲

SEATTLE — The epiphany that mushrooms could help save the world's ailing
bee colonies struck Paul Stamets while he was in bed.

"I love waking dreams," he said. "It's a time when you're just coming back
into consciousness."

Years ago, in 1984, Stamets had noticed a "continuous convoy of bees"
traveling from a patch of mushrooms he was growing and his beehives. The
bees actually moved wood chips to access his mushroom's mycelium, the
branching fibers of fungus that look like cobwebs.

"I could see them sipping on the droplets oozing from the mycelium," he
said. They were after its sugar, he thought.

Decades later, he and a friend began a conversation about bee colony
collapse that left Stamets, the owner of a mushroom mercantile, puzzling
over a problem. Bees across the world have been disappearing at an alarming
rate. Parasites like mites, fast-spreading viruses, agricultural chemicals
and lack of forage area have stressed and threatened wild and commercial
bees alike.

Waking up one morning, "I connected the dots," he said. "Mycelium have
sugars and antiviral properties," he said. What if it wasn't just sugar
that was useful to those mushroom-suckling bees so long ago?

In research published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, Stamets
turned intuition into reality. The paper describes how bees given a small
amount of his mushroom mycelia extract exhibited remarkable reductions in
the presence of viruses associated with parasitic mites that have been
attacking, and infecting, bee colonies for decades.

In the late 1980s, tiny Varroa mites began to spread through bee colonies
in the United States. The mites — which are parasites and can infect bees
with viruses — proliferate easily and cause colony collapse in just years.

Over time, colonies have become even more susceptible, and viruses became
among the chief threats to the important pollinators for crops on which
people rely.

"We think that's because the viruses have evolved and become pathogenic and
virulent," said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a University of Maryland professor in
entomology, who was not involved in the mycelium research. "Varroa viruses
kill most of the colonies in the country."

He likened the mites to dirty hypodermic needles; the mites are able to
spread viruses from bee to bee.

The only practical solution to date has been to keep the number of Varroa
mites within beehives "at manageable populations."

Stamet's idea about bee-helping mycelium could give beekeepers a powerful
new weapon.

Steve Sheppard, a Washington State University entomology professor, has
heard a lot of wild ideas to save bees over the years, like harnessing
static electricity to stick bees with little balls of Styrofoam coated in
mite-killing chemicals. Stamets' pitch was different: He had data to back
up his claims about mycelium's antiviral properties and his company, Fungi
Perfecti, could produce it in bulk. "I had a compelling reason to look
further," Sheppard said.

To test Stamets' theory, the researchers conducted two experiments: They
separated two groups of mite-exposed bees into cages, feeding one group
sugar syrup with a mushroom-based additive and the other, syrup without the
additive. They also field-tested the extract in small, working bee colonies
near WSU.

For several virus strains, the extract "reduced the virus to almost
nothing," said Brandon Hopkins, a WSU assistant research professor, another
author of the paper.

Because the extract can be added to syrups commercial beekeepers commonly
use, researchers say the extract could be a practical solution that could
scale quickly.

Meanwhile, Stamets has designed a 3D-printable feeder that delivers mycelia
extract to wild bees. He plans to launch the product, and an
extract-subscription service next year, to the public.

"The loss of biodiversity has ramifications that reverberate throughout the
food web," Stamets said, likening each species to parts of an airplane,
that hold the Earth together — until they don't.
"What rivet will we lose that we'll have catastrophic failure? I think the
rivet will be losing the bees," he said. "More than one-third of our food
supply is dependent on bees."




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