Bob writes:
> Show me some proof the mite was not sucking on another host and simply changed hosts around 1904? The Chinese notice small details.

In the more than one hundred years that varroa has been known, it has
been studied far and wide. Everyone, including these Chinese authors,
agrees that Apis cerana is its primary host. I had never heard anybody
suggest it moved from some other host. So I wonder why you think that
and how you would back that up? I could provide a stack of paper as
high as a house saying:

> The mite, Varroa jacobsoni Oudemans, was originally described as an ectoparasite of the Asian honey bee, Apis cerana Fabr. (Oudemans, 1904). Since the mite was originally a parasite of the Asian honey bee, it has had a long evolutionary association with the bee with the result that the host has evolved resistance which maintains the infestation at low level. Our observations clearly indicate that the Asian bees have evolved both a physiological and a behavioral adaptation to the parasitism of Varroa jacobsoni. The worker bees are physiologically sensitive to the parasitism of the mites, which allows them to respond immediately ...


"The Resistance Mechanism of the Asian Honey Bee, Apis cerana to
Varroa jacobsoni"
YING-SHIN PENG, Department of Entomology, University of California,
Davis, California 95616
YUENZHEN FANG, SHAOYU XU, AND LISHENG GE,  lnstitute of Apicultural
Research, Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, People's Republic
of China
writing in the JOURNAL OF INVERTEBRATE PATHOLOGY 49, 54-60 (1987)

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