Honey bee viruses didn’t seem to be a major issue for a long time. At least, they weren’t in the focus of beekeepers – and not that many bee scientists either. This changed quite a bit: first, the varroa mite transmitted the Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) leading to one of the most prominent symptoms of…
The finding that engineered bacteria could help against varroa and the Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) made a big buzz. These bacteria, Snodgrassella alvi, live naturally in the bee gut. Leonard et al. modified them to produce double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), which should interfere with crucial viral and varroa genes. Sounds crazy. But let’s go step by…
Varroa treatments arrived in crime. In a double sense, just bear with me for a while. In a crime series I watched some days ago, the victim was a beekeeper killed while working on his colonies. Beekeeping became so popular in the past years that I see quite a lot of magazines, TV shows, social…
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