John Ingle suggested that maybe the sterile male release technique could be
used to control varroa.

This method has been used for screw worms and for some fruit flies. For it
to be successful, it requires that you have a method for mass producing the
pest, separating the males from the females, sterilizing the males in a
manner that does not inhibit their fitness (they still need to seek out
females and mate with them), the males should not be a pest themselves, and
the females must only mate once in their life. The method does not work for
species where the females mate multiple times; in insects and mites, that
means, to multiple males.

Varroa is tricky in that each mother mite produces one male offspring in the
capped brood cell, and he mates with his sisters. Thus, the females are
already mated when they emerge. In addition, the males seem to be more
delicate and shorter lived than the females (most die before emerging from
the capped cell). For these two reasons, I think a sterile male release is
not likely to work for varroa mites.

Also, as easy as it is to produce varroa in the hive, it is very difficult
to produce en mass in the laboratory--which you would have to be able to do.

But it is good so see someone thinking outside the box!

Rosalind James
USDA-ARS
Bee Biology & Systematics Lab
Logan, UT

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