{"id":43255,"date":"2016-02-25T10:13:43","date_gmt":"2016-02-25T20:13:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=43255"},"modified":"2020-01-09T13:09:54","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T23:09:54","slug":"a-global-perspective-on-honeybee-virus-transmission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2016\/02\/25\/a-global-perspective-on-honeybee-virus-transmission\/","title":{"rendered":"A global perspective on honeybee virus transmission"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>
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University of Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> graduate student Scott Nikaido and researcher Ethel Villalobos examine honeybees in a hive.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ethel Villalobos<\/strong><\/a>, University of Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> at Mānoa researcher and director of the UH<\/abbr> Honeybee Project<\/a>, is an internationally recognized authority on bees and their pests and diseases. She was recently asked by the journal Science<\/em><\/a> to write an accompanying piece to an article they were publishing that explored the geographical origin and evolutionary history of the bee pest the Varroa mite and the deformed wing virus that it vectors.<\/p>\n

Villalobos’s article, titled “The mite that jumped, the bee that traveled and the disease that followed,”<\/a> was published in the same issue and provides context to the study by examining, in lay terms, the historical movement of managed European honeybee colonies out of their native range.<\/p>\n

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An electron microscope image of a Varroa mite. (Photo courtesy Jonathan Wright)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It examines how the human transport of managed hives had unforeseen repercussions for bee health: the European bee was exposed to new environments and was placed in contact with the Asian honeybee and its parasites. One parasitic mite, Varroa destructor<\/em>, “jumped” host species to the European bee and became a vector of previously mild viral diseases, in particular deformed wing virus, which is amplified in virulence when transmitted by mites.<\/p>\n