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Eric Pyrrhus

🐝 Bees have really had a hard couple of years.

Suggested factors leading to collapse of bee colonies worldwide include pesticides, bacteria, & parasitic mites.

But the picture would not be complete unless we looked into the possible role of viral infections, too.

And so, welcome to the bee :

"Nationwide genomic surveillance reveals the prevalence and evolution of honeybee viruses in China"
doi.org/10.1186/s40168-022-014

(shamelessly scooping @eddieholmes here 🤭)
@virology

Figure 4: Evolutionary relationships of the novel viruses found in honeybees and mites. Each phylogenetic tree was estimated based on RdRp (RNA-dependent RNA polymerase) domains using a maximum likelihood method. Viruses identified in this study are marked in red /blue and highlighted with a red /blue solid circle, whereas those representing the background phylogenetic diversity are shown in black. Some viruses identified previously in honeybees are denoted in gray solid circle or with solid black arrow.
Jan 15, 2023, 05:38 PM·Public·Web
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Eric Pyrrhus

🐝 It is worth noting that this study ☝️ specifically focused on those bees showing signs of disease.

So, did they find a 'smoking gun' to explain the collapse of colonies worldwide?

Well, besides the 20 novel bee viruses discovered, they also found "14 known pathogenic honeybee viruses" and "multiple viruses in almost 70% of the honeybee colonies."

The authors suggest more research, especially with regards to the newly discovered apis picorna-like virus 4 (APLV4)...

#virus#virology#virome
Public
Eric Pyrrhus

🐝Bee Viruses in Egypt🐝

A recent paper helps to shed a little more light on viruses that might contribute to the collapse of bee colonies...

• Bee samples were collected from 18 geographical regions across Egypt.
• Bees were screened by qPCR for 10 common viruses.
• Deformed Wing Virus was the most prevalent virus, followed by Black Queen Cell Virus and Acute Bee Paralysis Virus.

"Nationwide Screening for Bee Viruses in Apis mellifera Colonies in Egypt"
doi.org/10.3390/insects1402017

Figure 2. Prevalence of honey bee viruses (detected/not detected) and presence of varroa mites (detected/not detected) in honey bee samples collected from 54 apiaries across 18 governorates (3 apiaries per governorate, each apiary comprising 5 colonies) in Egypt during winter and summer, 2021.
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