What's In A Name? Mites Made Easy

摘要

It wasn't all that long ago that the name Varroa destructor (Anderson) began creeping into bee journals from its first mention in the publication Experimental and Applied Acarology in the year 2000. In fact I'd just learned to spell jacobsoni with one"i" instead of two and they up and change the name - at least destructor is a little easier to spell and is certainly more descriptive of the havoc it has wrought in the West. At first I thought of my college biology professor going on about "lumpers" and "splitters" (respectively referring to those taxono-mists who wanted to constrict or expand species criteria) and wondered just what was behind this renaming of the species. Delving in the deep end of the story proved not only to be very interesting but it has some practical potential for some of the bee projects I'm involved with in Southeast Asia.