> Data from an initial study in which investigators compared pathogens in honey bees affected by CCD suggested a putative role for Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, IAPV. Although subsequent studies have failed to find IAPV in all CCD diagnosed colonies, IAPV has been shown to cause honey bee mortality. RNA interference technology (RNAi) has been used successfully to silence endogenous insect (including honey bee) genes both by injection and feeding. Moreover, RNAi was shown to prevent bees from succumbing to infection from IAPV under laboratory conditions. In the current study IAPV specific homologous dsRNA was used in the field, under natural beekeeping conditions in order to prevent mortality and improve the overall health of bees infected with IAPV.
Here, the researchers start with the assumption that IAPV is a key player in colony collapse, which it is probably not and which is negated in their own summary: "studies have failed to find IAPV in all CCD diagnosed colonies". Then, they artificially infect hives with IAPV, and treat the resulting infection with RNA.
In some cases, the colonies that get the virus and the treatment appear to do better than the colonies that are left alone. In others, the control colonies (left alone) do better: "In PA, the difference between the weight at the start and the end of the experiment (4 months) shows that the non infected controls gained the most weight."
Despite these results, they state: "While overall honey production was not on the levels of commercial production ... the Remebee-I + IAPV treated hives still produced 30–300% more honey than the IAPV-only treated hives in PA and FL respectively".
This last part is very misleading. The 30% figure refers to the difference between the PA hives which were artificially infected with IAPV and those which got IAPV+treatment. Both of these categories did worse than the controls, but the difference between the controls (23.5 kg)and the IAPV+treatment (21 kg) was small (significance???) after four months.
Citation: Hunter W, Ellis J, vanEngelsdorp D, Hayes J, Westervelt D, et al. (2010) Large-Scale Field Application of RNAi Technology Reducing Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus Disease in Honey Bees (Apis mellifera, Hymenoptera: Apidae). PLoS Pathog 6(12): e1001160. doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1001160
***********************************************
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
Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm
|
