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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nAccording to the American Beekeeping Federation, honeybees contribute nearly $20 billion each year to the value of U.S. crop production, and they play an enormous role in global food production. The California almond industry, for example, requires approximately 1.8 million colonies of honeybees to pollinate nearly one million acres of orchards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But bee colonies have been beset by disease and die-offs. According to a national survey, beekeepers lost nearly 40% of their honeybee colonies during the 2018-19 winter, the highest rate reported since the survey began 13 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the suspects is the Varroa mite, a parasite spread in recent decades from East Asia to the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mite is \u201cconsidered the biggest problem in beekeeping today,\u201d said Mary Reed, chief apiary inspector of the Texas Apiary Inspection Service, an arm of Texas A&M University, \u201cThe reason is that they can vector viruses. If we didn\u2019t have honeybee viruses, the Varroa mite would just be considered a nuisance. If mite levels get too high, they can weaken the immune system of a single bee and of a whole colony.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After feeding on a honey bee host, the adult female mite reproduces by crawling off her host into a cell with a bee larva. Offspring then alternate between feeding on the larva and defecating on the side of the cell. While the mites do not kill adult honeybees, they can weaken and shorten individuals\u2019 lifespans and ultimately will kill the colony by outcompeting their host. And the mites are vectors of numerous viruses including deformed wing virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the background causes of particular instances of colony collapse disorder remain \u201ca contentious issue under investigation,\u201d said Sean Leonard, a graduate student and lead author of the study, \u201cmites are an increasingly severe problem\u201d over the past couple of decades that are contributing to high bee mortality rates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The UT team _ which involved at least eight other professors and students _ engineered one strain of bacteria to target the virus and another for the mites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Engineering the bacteria to \u201cknock down\u201d genetic targets in bee bodies, Moran said, the researchers found that compared with control bees, the bees treated with the strain of bacteria targeting the virus were 36.5% more likely to survive to day 10. Meanwhile, Varroa mites feeding on another set of bees treated with the mite-targeting strain of bacteria were about 70% more likely to die by day 10 than mites feeding on control bees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is the first time anyone has improved the health of bees by genetically engineering their microbiome,\u201d Leonard said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The team introduced modified bacteria to hundreds of bees in a laboratory setting. Sprayed with a sugar water solution containing the bacteria, the bees groomed one another and ingested the solution. The team found inoculating young worker bees with the engineered bacteria led the bees\u2019 immune systems to be primed to protect them against deformed wing virus _ essentially acting as a vaccine _ and caused the mites\u2019 own immune systems to fight against and ultimately kill them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Writing an accompanying commentary in Science, Robert J. Paxton, a zoologist with the Institute for Biology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany, writes that the approach is \u201ceffective, long-term, potentially cheap, and easy to apply.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The approach could \u201cprovide a solution to many of the honey bee\u2019s woes\u201d and provide a way \u201cto dissect the molecular intricacies of honey bees and their societies,\u201d Paxton said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But there remain major hurdles to any widespread rollout of the bacteria as a vaccinelike solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leonard said it remains an open question how the genetically engineered bacteria will perform in an actual hive, where social behavior among the bees could differ from inside the lab. \u201cHow they\u2019ll perform in an actual hive we don\u2019t know: it might be better or worse,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And because the bacteria are genetically modified, any manufacturer or distributor of the bacteria will first have to pass through regulatory hoops, Moran said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThese species of bacteria occur only in honey bees,\u201d said Moran. \u201cThey are not going to jump into butterflies or other insects or anything else. They\u2019re very restricted. They aren\u2019t going to invade the environment in some way that concerns people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The type of bacteria used are highly specialized to live in the bee gut, can\u2019t survive for long outside of it and are protective for a virus that strikes only bees. Still, further research will be needed to determine the effectiveness and safety of the treatments in agricultural settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
News about research like this is \u201calways good to hear,\u201d said Charles Reburn, co-owner of Bee Friendly Austin, which operates in Southwest Austin and sells bee hives, wax and honey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Having worked with Texas A&M University researchers, \u201cI know what it takes from initial study to getting something marketed,\u201d he said. \u201cIt takes a lot to get out of the lab and into the field. If it comes to testing, sign me up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Varroa mite, a common pest that can weaken bees and make them more susceptible to pathogens, feeds on a honeybee. University of Texas
Please g0 to Austin American-Statesman (Texas) at www.statesman.com to subscribe and for more information about this study and article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reprinted from Austin American-Statesman, Texas which owns the copyright<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AUSTIN, Texas \u2014 Honeybee populations have sharply declined around the world in recent years, confounding scientists and posing a grave threat to agriculture. Now, University of Texas researchers may have discovered a way to reverse the trend. Writing in the new issue of the journal Science, the team wrote that it had genetically engineered strains […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":455,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16],"tags":[31,32],"class_list":["post-452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-colony-collapse","category-mites","tag-gut-bacteria","tag-honeybee-survival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=452"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":458,"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452\/revisions\/458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldenglowbees.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}