The Mitey Bee Bouncers [time: ~ 2:59]

Whoa Varroa!  The Mitey Bee Bouncers are here.  Hi, I'm Jay Green with USDA's Agricultural Research Service or A.R.S.

Have you ever gotten a blood-sucking tick bite?  Not the greatest thing to see or feel, let alone fearing what disease it might give you.

Well, you might not know this, but honey bees are likewise bitten by mites, which are small tick-like creatures.  One mite in particular that attaches to the bee's body is called the Varroa mite.

It's only about one-sixteenth of an inch long, but that's long enough when you consider the bee itself is only about eleven-sixteenths of an inch. 

For more than 20 years, U.S. beekeepers have been battling these nasty mites. They attack the honey bee by feeding on its hemolymph (that's the combination of blood and fluid inside the bee).  They can weaken colonies of bees, and sometimes their feeding activities cause deformities in bees as they develop in brood cells.  And in fact, if left untreated, they can wipe out an entire colony in under two years.

Now, normally honey bees pollinate about $15 billion worth of U.S. crops; and that includes almonds, blueberries, apples, zucchini and many other flowering crops. And so, this blood-sucking Varroa destructor poses a serious threat to these foods.

Well, thanks to ARS, honey bees are now fighting back aggressively against the Varroa mite.
The mites are sometimes difficult for the bees to locate, since they attack the bee brood (or pupa or what we commonly call, "the babies").  The brood is capped inside cells deep within the colony with a wax barrier to protect the developing bees before they emerge.

So, ARS is developing bees with what's called the Varroa-sensitive hygiene or simply the VSH genetic trait.  Now this is pretty amazing: the VSH genetic trait allows the bees to more easily find the mites and then toss them out of the bee brood.  Generally, honey bees are pretty good nest cleaners.  They readily sniff out diseased or dead brood and remove it from the nest.

The VSH trait seems to be another version of nest cleaning in which the bees sniff out and remove Varroa-infested brood from the nest.  The VSH bees are pretty aggressive in their pursuit of the mites. The bees huddle together and gang up, chew and cut through the brood cap, lift the infested brood and their mites out, and then make (shall we say) a bee line to discard the brood from the colony.  The bees kill the mite offspring during this process, which greatly slows growth of the mite population in a colony.

So, if you want to see a video of this bee bouncing activity in action, just click on our Web site at ars.usda.gov.

That's yet another way ARS is helping us all with the food we eat, the water we drink, the clothes we wear, and the health we all want and deserve.

That's our podcast for today.  Have a BEE-utiful day everyone!