> As it happens, we are seeing decreased vitality in our bees and are unable to pinpoint a cause. ... coincidence and cause are not the same, however coincidences always merit close investigation.

Anyone and everyone can speculate. However, many of us have looked at the research on gut microbiota and seen nothing conclusive nor of note. Meanwhile, there are much more plausible avenues of research that I hope someone is working on:

VIRAL RECOMBINATION

1) There are two major reasons to study recombination. The first is that it is biologically interesting. For example, different strains of viruses often recombine to form new strains of recombinants leading to host-jumping or resistance to antiviral medicine, posing direct threat to our health.

2) the speed and frequency of travel may be one of the important factors, together with coinfection, that favors viral recombination.

3) a single IAPV fragment has been found integrated into the bee genome (Maori et al., 2007), and we therefore tentatively assumed that it carries sequences serving as ‘hot spots’ for recombination. A sequence of IAPV and an inverted sequence which is most highly homologous to KBV, indicating inter-viral recombination.

4) A pressing problem in studying the evolution of microbial pathogens is to determine the extent to which these genomes recombine. This information is essential for locating pathogenicity loci by using association studies or population genetic approaches.

5) Moore et al.  analysed viral RNA of 40 honeybee pupae, many of them infested by Varroa destructor mites. They identified novel recombinations of the two Picornavirales, Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) and Varroa Destructor Virus-1 (VDV-1).

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html