Читать книгу Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 39

A vigorously laying queen is the most efficient promoter of good genes, so it is of utmost importance to keep colonies headed by highly fertile queens. If a hive must be requeened, it is better to allow the bees to choose their new queen (if age‐appropriate larvae are present) than to replace her artificially since it has been shown that when bees are confronted with an emergency need for queen rearing, they do not select larvae at random for their queen cells (as a beekeeper might), but instead select larvae of certain patrilines (Moritz et al. 2005). In the future, beekeepers and bee doctors may be able to better assess queen quality through quantitative means; queen quality, judged in terms of body weight, is a good predictor of a queen's mating flight number, ovarian size, and overall mating success (Amiri et al. 2017).

Although insects lack the immunological memory provided by the antibodies of vertebrates, queen bees can recognize specific pathogens and prime their offspring against them (Salmela et al. 2015). The queen passes these immune signals to her future offspring via the egg‐yolk vitellogenin, a protein that has been shown to bind harmful bacteria, including the P. larvae of American foulbrood. Queens of local origin will pass onto their larva the essential immune cells that are adapted to the pathogens she has encountered in her environment, giving her offspring the chance to build defenses against disease agents before they (the bees) emerge and become exposed to pathogens in the nest.