Friday Parasite #9: …Or Not to Bee

Carl Zimmer just posted a piece over at The Loom about the just-published honeybee genome. He outlines some of the reasons scientists decided to focus time and money on the project -- to wit: bees are commercially valuable, they have complex social systems, and they have interesting developmental patterns. But he leaves out one important reason – honeybees all over the world are being killed by an invasive mite.

               

Varroa destructor is an ectoparasite, and it’s deadly – mites indiscriminately attack adults, larvae, and pupating bees to drink their blood, and can destroy a hive in as little as one year. It was originally a parasite of Asiatic honeybees, but sometime in the 1960s it expanded its diet to include the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) . Then it started spreading around the world. It got to Florida sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and it's now found throughout the United States. They’re a major problem for beekeepers, and they’ve wiped out more than 90% of the wild hives in this country.

Granted, honeybees aren’t native to North America either. But they’re major pollinators that are instrumental in growing our fruits and vegetables. If the bees aren’t around to help the plants have sex, the plants are going to have to rely on other pollinators if they’re going to grow more seed-filled fruits for us to eat.

We know that some Euopean honeybees have “hygenic behaviors” that let them find and destroy infected pupae. If these behaviors are triggered by hormones that are coded in the bee’s genes, the genome project might be a step toward developing treatments using the bee’s own physiology to fight the mite.

Reference:
Spivak M, Reuter GS (2001) Varroa destructor Infestation in Untreated Honey Bee (Hymenoptera: Apidae) Colonies Selected for Hygienic Behavior. Journal of Economic Entomology: Vol. 94, No. 2 pp. 326–331

Photo from USDA.

Comments

[John Whitfield]

Well done for making this point - bee diseases are a huge problem, and pollination is a huge economic issue.

According to a new paper in Population Ecology, bumble bees have the same problem. They have been commercially traded between Europe and Japan (I assume for pollination), and this has likewise shifted parasitic mites around, to the bees' detriment. The paper is at dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10144-006-0010-8

I've written about bee diseases, particularly varroa, and what the bee genome might be able to do to help, on my blog, gentraso.blogspot.com.

Oh, and thanks for reading my book! I really appreciate it. Hope you like, and be interested to hear what you think. The book's site is www.inthebeatofaheart.com.