The Latest In Honey Bee Research

摘要

While there have been a number of studies of the interaction between honey bees and the parasitic mite Varroa destructor, few have actually tracked the fate of an isolated population of infested honey bees over the long term. Exceptions include several studies of an Italian strain of honey bees surviving untreated in the presence of mites since 1984 on the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha. Over time, this isolated honey bee population became increasingly tolerant of the mites or the mites became increasingly less virulent to the bees (or both), with the consequence that mite densities found in colonies on Fernando de Noronha have declined over the period since the initial infestation. Similar instances of mite-tolerant bee populations have been reported from a few other locales, usually in places where bees and mites occurred together and natural selection was able to act on the populations of bees and mites without the added variable of miticides. Apparently, in the absence of chemical mite suppression, highly susceptible honey bee colonies were rapidly lost to mites, while colonies exhibiting higher tolerance to mites survived and reproduced to a greater extent.