Location: Bee Research Laboratory
Title: Found in Translation: Oversharing by honey beesAuthor
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Submitted to: Bee Culture
Publication Type: Review Article Publication Acceptance Date: 1/7/2022 Publication Date: 2/22/2022 Citation: Evans, J.D. 2022. Found in Translation: Oversharing by honey bees. Bee Culture. 1:24-25. Interpretive Summary: Technical Abstract: All creatures thrive on food, safe shelter, and freedom from disease. Honey bees are big eaters thanks to their numbers and can deplete resources in and around apiaries at times, but their foraging bouts from yard- or road-bound hives generally leave a lot of geography for others. Similarly, honey bees compete with their own pests for housing but not with other pollinators, since the honey bee housing market is provided by humans for the most part. That leaves disease, and many scientists are actively testing for signs that diseases carried by honey bees might impact other species, or vice versa. For disease organisms ranging from bacteria to fungi and gut parasites there seems little ‘spillover’, if any, from honey bees to others. This has led to an intense focus on the well-studied viruses carried by bees. Could viruses now raging in honey bees make the leap to unsuspecting hosts of other species? If so, how would that impact those species? |
