Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus: Honey Bee Queen⁻Worker Interaction and Potential Virus Transmission Pathways.

ABSTRACT: Queen loss or failure is an important cause of honey bee colony loss. A functional queen is essential to a colony, and the queen is predicted to be well protected by worker bees and other mechanisms of social immunity. Nevertheless, several honey bee pathogens (including viruses) can infect queens. Here, we report a series of experiments to test how virus infection influences queen⁻worker interactions and the consequences for virus transmission. We used Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) as an experimental pathogen because it is relevant to bee health but is not omnipresent. Queens were observed spending 50% of their time with healthy workers, 32% with infected workers, and 18% without interaction. However, the overall bias toward healthy workers was not statistically significant, and th

SUBMITTER: Amiri E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6359674 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature