Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => GENERAL BEEKEEPING - MAIN POSTING FORUM. => Topic started by: van from Arkansas on May 28, 2020, 07:00:04 pm
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While watching my bee hive entrance, a nurse bee drags out this pupae showing obvious signs of dwarf wing virus, DWV. The virus is transmitted by the Varroa mite.
What I like to see: is nurse bees decapping and removing DWV pupae as you in the photo. A process we call hygenic behavior which is a quality I breed for. So I am excited to see the pupae removed from the hive before the diseased pupae has a chance to hatch. Nurse bees are doing a good job here. I am trying to breed a better bee. BTW, I do not sell queens, this is not a sales pitch. If you want a queen, drive over, I?ll give you a queen.
Cheers
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The bee is yellow and fuzzy without dark striping because the bee was removed early and not allowed to hatch which would have occurred in about another 24 hrs. This pupae was extremely soft bodied, so delicate at prehatch stage. The pupae is alive but hardly moves, legs to soft to support weight.
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Thank you for posting this, Van; It's fascinating to learn this and better understand traits that you look for when breeding queens to enhance genetic traits in future generations of bees. Upon seeing your picture originally I thought it was a descendant go that golden queen you posted recently.
How is it that the nurse bees are able to detect DWV in a capped pupae before it hatches?
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Thank you for posting this, Van; It's fascinating to learn this and better understand traits that you look for when breeding queens to enhance genetic traits in future generations of bees. Upon seeing your picture originally I thought it was a descendant go that golden queen you posted recently.
How is it that the nurse bees are able to detect DWV in a capped pupae before it hatches?
That is the question we would all like to know: how the nurse bee knows?? Scent is suspected via a peep hole?
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Mr Van, I have never heard of how the nurse bees know which brood is infected. I would take a wild guess as smell.
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Great pictures as always, Van. Very interesting.
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Van, good picture of deformed wing virus. Really nice to see the bees pulling those. I sometimes see similar drone pupa tossed out front with the shrivelled wings. Here is a young house bee with it going about her duties.
It is called DWV, a virus, but I often wonder if it has been mis-named. Could it possibly be simply the effect of varroa chewing on the ultra sensitive larvae/pupae wing nublets during development?
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The wings are one of the last parts of the pupa to develop, before the wings start to develop the varroa have established their feeding location on the pupa. The mother mite has already established this site before the eggs are laid. The young varroa use the same site the mother mite made.
The deformed wings do not always occur on pupa infected with the virus. I read a study that stated that for the wings to be deformed the virus must be lodged in the bee's brain. I have searched for this study several time after reading it in the ABJ, but I can't find it. It may be that further investigation found this not to be true.
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Thank you for posting this, Van; It's fascinating to learn this and better understand traits that you look for when breeding queens to enhance genetic traits in future generations of bees. Upon seeing your picture originally I thought it was a descendant go that golden queen you posted recently.
How is it that the nurse bees are able to detect DWV in a capped pupae before it hatches?
That is the question we would all like to know: how the nurse bee knows?? Scent is suspected via a peep hole?
Fascinating nonetheless. Great, informative post. Thanks.
I ran across this excerpt of a recently published ABJ article when reading more about DWV in case anyone would like to read, As it's an excerpt it's not too long:
ENGINEERED GUT MICROBES COMBAT VARROA AND DWV IN HONEY BEES
April 1, 2020 - Scott McArt - (excerpt)
Teaser clip:
"For their study, Leonard and colleagues genetically modified naturally-occurring gut bacteria in honey bees to ?teach? the bee immune system to recognize and destroy viruses and the varroa mite. They did this by engineering microbes that, once accepted by the host bees, changed bee gene expression and immunity via the production of RNA interference (RNAi) molecules."
The full article can bee found here:
https://americanbeejournal.com/engineered-gut-microbes-combat-varroa-and-dwv-in-honey-bees/