>Hasegawa, et al (2023) Evolutionarily diverse origins of deformed wing viruses in western honey bees
Nice paper. Interesting that they wrestle with the same conundrum that other recent scholarship has - and still doesn't answer the question of why DWV-B appears to be supplanting DWV-A on a global scale.
... epidemiological data suggest a spread that started over the past two decades, long after the varroa host switch that started in the mid-20th century...
In contrast to DWV-A, we found no evidence that DWV-B population history was affected by the Varroa host switch at a global level.
Yet, there are increases in DWV-B levels in honey bees, particularly in Europe and North America (19<https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301258120#core-r19>, 36<https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301258120#core-r36>, 54<https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301258120#core-r54>), and we see an increase in effective population size in that lineage of DWV-B that is contemporaneous with the spread of varroa in these regions (Fig. 2B<https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301258120#fig02>). Future work should investigate the origins of DWV-B to ascertain how new viruses can enter the varroa–bee ecosystem.
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