Abstract
Large-scale colony losses among managed Western honey bees have become a serious threat to the beekeeping industry in the last decade. Multiple factors contribute to these losses, but the impact of Varroa destructor parasitism is by far the most important, along with the contribution of some pathogenic viruses vectored by the mite. So far, more than 20 viruses have been identified infecting the honey bee, most of them RNA viruses. They may be maintained either as covert infections or causing severe symptomatic infections, compromising the viability of the colony. In silico analysis of available transcriptomic data obtained from mites collected in the USA and Europe, as well as additional investigation with new samples collected locally, allowed the description of three RNA viruses, two of them variants of the previously described VDV-2 and VDV-3 and the other a new species reported here for the first time. Our results showed that these viruses were widespread among samples and that they were present in the mites as well as in the bees but with differences in the relative abundance and prevalence. However, we have obtained strong evidence showing that these three viruses were able to replicate in the mite, but not in the bee, suggesting that they are selectively infecting the mite. This opens the door to future applications that may help controlling the mite through biological control approaches.
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Acknowledgements
Joel González-Cabrera was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Ramón y Cajal Program (RYC-2013-13834). The work at the Universitat de València was funded by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CGL2015‐65025‐R, MINECO/FEDER, UE). Research at the Universitat de València of Stefano Parenti was possible thanks to the Erasmus + program from the EU. Finally, we thank Fernando Calatayud and Enrique Simó, from the local beekeeper association ‘apiADS’, for providing bees and mites.
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Supplementary material 3 Table S2. Accession number of viral sequences used in this work for phylogenetic reconstruction (DOCX 29 kb)
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Supplementary material 4 Figure S1. Phylogenetic analysis of the VDV-2. Maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree of the putative RdRp amino acid sequences of Varroa destructor virus 2 and closely related members of the Iflaviridae and Dicistroviridae families. Values on blanches indicates the aLRT support. Branches with aLRT values <0.6 have been collapsed. The grey scale bar represents 0.2 amino acid substitution per site. Sequence accession identifiers are provided in Table S2 (TIFF 1204 kb)
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Herrero, S., Millán-Leiva, A., Coll, S. et al. Identification of new viral variants specific to the honey bee mite Varroa destructor. Exp Appl Acarol 79, 157–168 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10493-019-00425-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10493-019-00425-w