Date: June 13, 2016
Source: Taylor & Francis
In a new study published in
the Journal of Apicultural Research, scientists have compared the ability
of two strains of honey bees to defend themselves against the parasitic mite
varroa by grooming the mites from their bodies.
The mite Varroa
destructor is generally considered to be the greatest threat to honey bees
worldwide because it transmits virus diseases which lead to colony death.
Treatments by various chemicals have become less effective in recent years
because the mites have become resistant to them. This has led to attempts to
breed strains of bee that are resistant to the mite. One of the possible
mechanisms of resistance is "grooming" behaviour, where bees brush
bees from themselves (autogrooming) or brush bees from their nestmates (allogrooming).
It has long been known that different strains of bee differ in their resistance
to varroa. In particular so-called Africanized bees (hybrids of Apis mellifera scutellata) bees appear
to have more resistance than European strains.
Ciro Invernizzi and colleagues
from the Facultad de Ciencias, Montevideo, Uruguay, compared grooming behaviour
in Italian (Apis mellifera ligustica)
and Africanized bees. They found that at the individual level, Africanized bees
showed a higher total number of reaction behaviours to V.
destructor than did Italian bees, and colonies of Africanized bees showed
a higher proportion of injured mites than colonies of Italian bees did.
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