Tackling the blood-sucking killer of honey bees

A major investment from public and private sector organisations is helping scientists develop new ways of tackling the biggest killer of honey bees worldwide – the bloodsucking varroa destructor mite.

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen and the National Bee Unit, part of the UK’s Food and Environment Research Agency, have worked out how to ‘knock down’ genes in the parasitic mite causing it to die.

So far the work has only been done in the laboratory but now the team can take a step closer towards developing a product that could help beekeepers. This follows funding worth more than £250,000 (US$401,500) from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the company Vita (Europe) Ltd.

Lead researcher Dr Alan Bowman said honey bees were incredibly important because of their pollination of flowers in wild and farmed plants:

“But their numbers are seriously declining year on year and while there are probably several reasons for this, one of the most important factors is varroa destructor that sucks the blood from bees and transmits serious viral diseases,” he said.

Bowman said there was an urgent need to develop a varroa-specific, environmentally friendly treatment or some method of overcoming the varroa’s resistance mechanism to existing treatments.

Max Watkins, technical director of Vita, a major funder of the research, said finding treatments that killed varroa mites but did not harm honeybees, bee products or the environment was not easy.

The challenge was heightened because the relatively short life cycle of the varroa mite meant that resistance to a single treatment could often develop quite quickly unless beekeepers alternated treatments of different types.

The researchers plan to scour databases of all the varroa genes in a bid to identify those that could be effectively and safely targeted by potential new treatments. Bowman said that having proved the concept in the laboratory, he hoped the new funding would help the research have real-world impact.