When comparing honey bee pathogen, pest, and disease profiles from one country to the next, I take the 2015 report by Roberts, Anderson, and Durr as the most recent and authoritative one available for Australia (at least on-line). “Upgrading knowledge on pathogens (particularly viruses) of Australian honey bees.”
http://www.agrifutures.com.au/wp-content/uploads/publications/15-095.pdf
The Australian study is based on sampling/testing in the period August 2013 to April 2015.
Three pathogens are of interest to me in this report – Nosema ceranae, DWV, and EFB.
Re. Nosema ceranae and EFB, Roberts, et al. note that “Nosema ceranae is an emerging pathogen that has spread across Australia’s eastern states, but is yet to be found in WA (Hornitzky 2011). Similarly, European foulbrood (EFB, Melissococcus pluton) is common across the east coast, but is not recorded in WA or NT (McKee et al. 2003).” (p.1)
Re. DWV, the authors note that:
“Based on the NPV calculated for each sampling region, there was good statistical support for “freedom from disease” in each region for a range of scenarios (Table 2). The two largest sampling regions, east coast and south WA, had > 0.99 probability of freedom from disease under all scenarios assuming > 0.2 within apiary prevalence and > 0.1 apiary level prevalence. The three smaller regions (NT & KUN, TAS and KI) also had > 0.99 probability of freedom from disease for these scenarios but only when assuming a prior FFD belief of 0.95 or 0.99. Overall, this analysis supports with high confidence that SPV and DWV are not present in Australia.” (p.9)
However,
“SPV or DWV were not clearly detected in any sample, although a small number of short virus sequences was found that were 77% – 89% similar to SPV and 77% – 92% similar to DWV. This level of identity is generally too small to be considered the same virus, but could represent variant strains of these viruses as both SPV and DWV are part of virus complexes with 83% – 84% identity between variant strains (de Miranda et al. 2010b; Moore et al. 2011). More sequence information and understanding of their pathology in honey bees will be needed to determine the true relationship of these virus sequences with SPV and DWV.” (p.11)
Here in Newfoundland, package bees imported from Western Australia in 2016 were sampled/tested by our provincial apiarist and the National Bee Diagnostic Centre at Beaverlodge, Alberta. EFB and DWV were detected in samples from one of two apiaries sampled (under quarantine). Nosema ceranae was not detected in any of the samples. See Table 1 http://nlbeekeeping.ca/data/documents/Response-to-NLBKA-Re-Nosema-ceranae-_-July-4-2017.pdf
Do any of you in BEE-Land have current information (i.e., post 2015) re. the presence or absence of DWV and EFB in Western Australia?
***********************************************
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
|
