Serendipity can be a fun companion. Unfortunately you don't get to meet her through formal introduction. You always make her acquaintance accidentally. It appears that Serendipity may have a few things to say about Varroa mites and Lithium salts. The study in the link below suggests Lithium Chloride, or perhaps Lithium Citrate has promise as a treatment to rid bees of Varroa.
For those of you who aren't already aware, Lithium compounds have been used used to treat mood disorders since the 1800's and are still in use today. I wonder if treating with Lithium would have a dual effect, in terms of killing mites and calming aggressive bees? The effect would only be temporary, though. -calming bees, that is. Death is usually a permanent condition.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-19137-5.pdfRNAi-based methods
were proposed recently as a promising new tool. However, the application of these methods according
to published protocols has led to a surprising discovery. Here, we show that the lithium chloride that
was used to precipitate RNA and other lithium compounds is highly effective at killing Varroa mites
when fed to host bees at low millimolar concentrations. Experiments with caged bees and brood-free
artificial swarms consisting of a queen and several thousand bees clearly demonstrate the potential
of lithium as miticidal agent with good tolerability in worker bees providing a promising basis for the
development of an effective and easy-to-apply control method for mite treatment.
