A Little about Lyme

Early this morning, I went to the bees again. I needed to reduce the entrance: with fewer bees emerging for the rest of the season, they need a smaller opening to defend.

I was embarrassed for myself when I saw that I had pulled the entrance reducer entirely from the Celadon hive. They must have had a difficult time trying to defend their home from robbers. When I replaced the entrance, immediately dozens of bees with golden pollen in their saddlebags huddled at the former opening, seeking the specific spot they could enter. So great to see the number of productive worker bees.

The Celestial hive was not as easy. I tried to remove the box from the base, so I could put in the proper sized entrance. But the heavy box stuck firm, as the bees have been sealing cracks with propolis. When I would move the box, the base would move, too. After brief wrestling, I did manage to remove it, but the entrance reducer was jammed, and then I got stung on the back of the hand, and the number of agitated bees increased. The honey water I'd brought down had first one drowned bee, then a dozen, and I was no longer in a good frame of mind to help the bees.

I did what I could at the time, and later went back and wrestled with the entrance reducer until it was back in place. And all was good. The hives are eating between a pint and a quart of thick honey water a day.

I spent a bit of time this morning reading Healing Lyme. With the number of ticks we've had on us or attached to us over the last two years, I figure I should know more about lyme.

What I read so far was fascinating. Lyme is not solely transmitted through ticks: mosquitoes, human fluids (like tears and saliva), mother to in utero child are all other vectors. But the tick is the most prominent.

Having intimate experience with ticks, I was interested to learn about the three sizes. Each tick lands on a host at each stage, and falls off when full. The teeny ones yesterday were tick larvae: about the size of the point of a pin, they are tiny but fast, and, of the sizes, not terribly infections. Today I found a couple new ones crawling on my leg. They were a bit bigger, the size of a pin head. These are the second level of tick development, and the most infectious, because they are small enough to easily miss, but are more likely to have the lyme spirochete (a corkscrew-shaped bacteria, pronounced SPI rah keet). The large, adult ticks are the least likely to infect people, mostly because they are easily seen. I have now had all three types on me: larvae, nymph, and adult. Blech.

The most surprising information to me was how the ticks both receive and transmit the spirochete. Once a tick lands on an animal with blood (mammal, bird, reptile), it saws through the outer layer of skin to reach blood vessels just below the surface. The tick secretes a milky cement that hardens around that penetration site. This both holds the tick in place and acts like a gasket to prevent blood loss or leakage of tick saliva at the point of entry.

Under the attachment, the tick gouges out a tiny pit to the dermis, which fills with blood. Then the ticks feed from the pool: they let the pit fill, and drink at their leisure, and as the tick feeds, its body engorges. When full, they drop off, and leave the cement behind, embedded in the skin.

As soon as they penetrate the skin, they release a unique blend of chemicals into the blood, which basically calls all spirochetes that might be in the host. The spirochetes come, like metal filings to a magnet, flow into the tick, and colonize the tick's gut tissues. This often happens to the larvae; then, as nymphs, they will be ready to infect their next host with the lyme spirochete.

On the host, the tick alternates between taking blood and releasing its saliva into the wound, and this is the really disturbing part. The saliva is very bioactive, and counteracts the three main immune defenses of the host, that should begin immediately upon the attachment of something like a tick: hemostasis (blood coagulation, platelet aggregation, and vasoconstriction), inflammation, and immunity (innate or acquired). So the tick shuts down the host's defenses while it eats.

The spirochete infects the host during the saliva’s activity. In test animals, the spirochete doesn't often infect the host, because the body's immunity is strong enough. But the tick's saliva is the problem.

So, there was my little lesson on lyme. At some point, I'll read more about how to counteract it. Apparently the rounds of antibiotics are miraculous when they work, but they don't work in 40% of the cases.

I have much to learn!