Darwinian black box selection for resistance to settled invasive Varroa destructor parasites in honey bees

Tjeerd Blacquière,Johan Calis,Peter Neumann,Arrigo Moro,Delphine Panziera,Willem Boot

doi:10.1007/s10530-019-02001-0

Abstract

Established invasive species can pose a continuous threat to biodiversity and food security, thereby calling for sustainable mitigation. There is a consensus that the ubiquitous ecto-parasitic mite Varroa destructor, an invasive species from Asia, is the main biological threat to global apiculture with Apis mellifera. V. destructor has almost completely wiped out wild European honey bee (Apis mellifera) populations. The only remedy for apiculture, to date, is frequent control measures against the mite throughout the season, which prevents possible adaptations. While targeted breeding efforts have, so far, not achieved the selection of tolerant or resistant bees, natural selection approaches have succeeded at least seven times. Here, we propose to take advantage of natural selection for honey bee resistance by stopping mite treatment in managed colonies. The main principles are within population mating of the colonies’ own virgin queens and drones and selection based on survival and proliferous development of colonies. Being used for 10 years, it has shown to result in grosso modo ‘normal’ colonies with a high level of resistance to V. destructor. Here, we call for local groups of beekeepers and scientists to join a novel natural selection program that has started so far on three locations. This will eventually lead to several locally adapted V. destructor resistant honey bee populations around the world, and help global apiculture becoming more sustainable.

Highlights

IntroductionThe Western honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) has an almost global distribution, both as wild (endemic in Europe, Africa and the middle-East, naturalized in the Americas, Asia and Australia) and as a managed species (Moritz et al 2005)
The Western honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) has an almost global distribution, both as wild and as a managed species (Moritz et al 2005)
This was the case for the ecto-parasitic mite Varroa destructor (Anderson and Trueman 2000), which has shifted hosts from the Eastern honey bee (Apis cerana) to A. mellifera

Summary

Introduction

The Western honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) has an almost global distribution, both as wild (endemic in Europe, Africa and the middle-East, naturalized in the Americas, Asia and Australia) and as a managed species (Moritz et al 2005). As a consequence of the globalization of apiculture, the number of novel pathogens affecting A. mellifera has increased through host shifts from closely related species This was the case for the ecto-parasitic mite Varroa destructor (Anderson and Trueman 2000), which has shifted hosts from the Eastern honey bee (Apis cerana) to A. mellifera. The population preserves its genetic diversity, and its associated diverse biome (both favourable and unfavourable associated organisms; bacteria, yeasts, fungi, viruses, mites, etc.,) which fosters development of less virulent host– parasite relationships (Neumann and Blacquiere 2017; Blacquiere and Panziera 2018) This precludes a generation queen being confronted with a completely new biotic environment (colony plus biota). Recent research of Avalos et al (2017) showed that evolution by passage through a selective bottleneck can be very fast (only ten generations/years) in the highly polyandrous honey bee

Procedure and principles

Findings

Compliance with ethical standards