Читать книгу Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 29

Living in crowded communities of thousands of individuals, honey bees interact closely through regular communication behaviors, grooming activities, and the trophallactic transfer of food and glandular secretions. This complex group living provides abundant opportunities for pathogens to spread and reproduce. Moreover, the high temperature and high humidity of a honey bee colony's home makes it a perfect environment for disease outbreaks. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the protective mechanisms that honey bees have evolved to control the spread of disease operate at the level of the whole colony, the superorganism. The members of a colony work together closely to achieve a social immunity: they groom themselves and one another (allogroom); they work as undertakers to remove dead and diseased bees; they collect antibiotic enriched pollen and nectar; and they practice miticidal and hygienic behaviors by biting off the body parts of mites and by removing infected bee larvae and pupae from their nests (Fries and Camazine 2001). Relatively few mechanisms of disease resistance have evolved at the level of the individual bee. These include individual immune system functioning and filters in the proventriculus (the valve between esophagus and stomach) that remove spores of American foulbrood. Most of these protective mechanisms limit intra‐colony transmission of disease agents, and they work well. What is probably the primary driver of disease problems for honey bees at present, however, is inter‐colony disease transmission.