A parasitic mite called the Varroa destructor has been wreaking havoc on bee colonies worldwide. Many bees die because of this mite. Fortunately, there are chemicals and methods designed to contain parasites like this. However, through time, mites such as Varroa develop resistance over these chemicals, which makes the treatments ineffective sometimes. Worse, the treatment backfires.
One such example of this event is when amateur beekeeper BartJan Fernhout gave a chemical to his bees in order to fight the deadly parasitic mite.
The chemical Fernhout used to fight his mites… stopped his queens from laying eggs. That caused the workers to kill the barren queens and begin to raise new royalty, a ruthless reaction the bees evolved long ago to ensure the future of their hives.
Frustrated by what happened to his queens, Fernhout made up his mind that there had to be a better way to combat the mites.
The next year, he took a buyout from his research job at a veterinary firm to found Arista Bee Research, a nonprofit that has joined a growing global quest to breed honey bees able to resist Varroa mites on their own.
It's been slow, laborious work. Since the mite jumped from Asian honey bees (Apis cerana) to the common domesticated European honey bee (A. mellifera) more than a half-century ago, researchers have discovered some bees can keep the mite in check through behaviors such as fastidious grooming and removing mite-infested larvae. But identifying bees able to mount these responses is tedious. A standard way to evaluate grooming, for example, is to count how many mite legs have been chewed off by vigilant bees. And the complexities of bee reproduction make it cumbersome to combine mite-resistance traits with others valued by apiarists. Although researchers and breeders have created bees that require fewer pesticides, even these colonies can be overrun by mites—and very few lines can yet survive without any treatment. "There is progress, but not very significant," says Benjamin Dainat, a bee researcher and breeder at the Swiss Bee Research Centre in Bern.
New molecular tools promise to accelerate those efforts. A new protein-based test, for example, would allow beekeepers to simply send a laboratory a few dozen antennae, plucked from their bees, to learn whether the insects have mite-detecting powers. Other scientists are sequencing the genomes of huge numbers of bees, hoping to create a relatively cheap and easy way to identify bees that carry genes for the protective behaviors. Such a test "is almost the Holy Grail" of anti-Varroa research, Fernhout says.
Know more about this over at Science Magazine.
(Video Credit: Science Magazine/ YouTube)