"Beyond more varroa producing higher virus infections things get pretty difficult to interpret."

One thing stood out when I read this, namely spaetzle downregulation happens to the Russians in the presence of two foundress mites, and Toll is also downregulated.  Aside from being a tasty German dish, spaetzle is an essential maternal developmental gene that is part of the mechanism for determining dorso-ventral polarity in insects (and others), and Toll is its counterpart (they form ligand and receptor, respectively).  They are maternal genes....meaning that the queen must produce them and place them properly along one side of the fertile egg as it travels down her oviduct, so that the embryo in the egg "learns" up from down (to put it in simple terms).

Spaetzle and Toll are therefore critical to development as they are part of fundamental body plan organization.

Thus, I would expect the percentage of fecundity in the queens to be lower because without enough spaetzle and Toll, embryos will not organize their body axes properly and they will fail to develop (eggs won't hatch).  But since queens are rarely parasitized by Varroa, I don't know whether this happens....I just find it interesting that those particular genes are affected by Varroa parasitism, and coincidentally we have more queens that seem to be faulty layers these days.  There are other critical maternal genes, maybe other stressors in the hive affect some of them...this may just be one example (?).  Maybe the queen's gene expression pattern IS somehow affected just by the presence of Varroa in the hive???

Christina

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