Author: Susan Milius / Source: Science News
Tests with fake bee larvae reveal that a “vampire” mite attacking honeybees may not be so much a bloodsucker as a fat slurper.
The ominously named Varroa destructor mite invaded North America in the 1980s, and has become one of the biggest threats to honeybees. Based on research from the 1970s, scientists thought that the parasitic mites feed on the bee version of blood, called hemolymph. But the mites are actually after the fat of young and adult honeybees, says entomologist Samuel Ramsey, who is joining the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md.
That insight might aid the largely failed efforts to develop antimite compounds for feeding to bees, says toxicologist Aaron Gross of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. He has documented mites resisting some of the current controls and hopes for new options.
Ramsey’s rethink started with Varroa biology. For instance, the mites don’t have the more flexible body that can swell with a lot of incoming fluid or a gut specialized for elaborate liquid filtering that many other bloodsuckers do. And insect hemolymph looked to Ramsey like a weak, watery choice for exclusive nutrition.
So Ramsey spent about a year while at the University of Maryland in College Park developing artificial bee larvae from gelatin capsules that let him test how well mites survived when fed different proportions of fat from an organ called the bee fat body versus hemolymph. Mites lived for just 1.8 days on average on pure hemolymph. The only ones to survive the entire seven-day tests — though few in number —…
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