Читать книгу Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 21

We will begin our account of the health and fitness of wild colonies by relating the story of the Varroa mite (V. destructor), a parasite that switched hosts from the Eastern honey bee (Apis cerana) to the Western honey bee (A. mellifera). In order to understand the resistance to Varroa mites that is found in wild honey bee colonies, we must examine more deeply their genes and their lifestyle.

Beekeepers today rely primarily on commercial queen producers for their bee stock. Most hobby beekeepers, for example, will start an apiary or add colonies to an apiary by purchasing either a “package” of bees shipped in a cage or a nucleus colony (“nuc”) living in a small hive. In North America, packaged bees are shipped from various southern states in the U.S., as well as from California, and Hawaii, so they consist of stock that is not necessarily adapted to the beekeeper's local climate, temperatures, and agents of disease. Furthermore, even though queen bees are also produced and sold across North America – their genetics often traces to just a handful of colony lines. In many places, good colony health can be fostered by the use of locally‐adapted bees.

From an evolutionary perspective, the observation that wild colonies have rapidly adapted to the Varroa mite, and to the diseases they vector, over a remarkably short timeframe (ca. 10 years), suggests that surviving wild colonies have either good genes (DNA), a good lifestyle, or both (Seeley 2017a).