Abstract
Honey bees play a vital role in providing pollination services for agricultural crops and wild flowering plants. However, the spillover risk of their pathogens to other pollinators or wild insects is becoming a cause for concern. There is some evidence that stingless bees can carry honey bee viruses, but little is known about the presence of honey bee viruses in stingless bees in China. Here, we investigate the occurrence of major honey bee pathogens including bacteria, fungi, and viruses in stingless bees (Apidae: sp.). Our results show that the stingless bees (Apidae: sp.) were mainly infected with DWV-A, but no DWV-B and DWV-C. Phylogenetic analysis on fragments of lp, RdRp, and VP3 of DWV-A indicated that genetic variation in VP3 might an important indicator for host-specific viruses, but it requires further study. Our results indicated that DWV-A is not only the major strain of virus currently circulating in managed bee colonies in China and globally, but in stingless bee species as a whole.
Highlights
Honey bees play an important role in flowering plants in the agri-ecosystem, but viral diseases pose a severe threat to honey bee population growth [1]
We found that two strains of Deformed wing virus (DWV) (DWV-A and DWV-A/Kakugo virus (KV)) were found in stingless bees collected in the Yunnan province of China
Based on the alignment of amplification fragments of DWV, RdRp, Lp, and VP3 with nucleotide sequences of representative DWV strains from honey bees (A. mellifera, A. ceranae), bumblebee, wasp, and a parasite (Varroa destructor), phylogenetic analysis was conducted by the neighbor-joining method with 1000 bootstrap replications using MEGA 7.0 (Figure 1)
Summary
Honey bees play an important role in flowering plants in the agri-ecosystem, but viral diseases pose a severe threat to honey bee population growth [1]. DWV is considered the most prevalent bee virus worldwide due to its close relation to colony decline induced by interactions between Varroa destructor and DWV [11]. DWV is causing growing concern because it can infect and replicate in multiple invertebrates including bumblebees, solitary bees, wasps, and ants [26, 27]. This suggests that DWV is spreading to other insect species, especially wild bee species, and poses a potential threat to their population growth [28,29,30,31,32]. This suggested that DWV in these stingless bees was most likely obtained from A. mellifera, but it needs to be further confirmed
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