Diagnosis of the disease status of honeybee colonies is a time-consuming, labor intensive affair, requiring careful examination of individual frames or bees for symptoms of impending diseases or parasites. In most cases definitive diagnosis requires laboratory equipment and techniques not available to most beekeepers. By the time overt symptoms of a disease appear at hive level, the epidemic is usually out of control, requiring heavy chemical treatment or even incineration of whole hives. Consequently, commercial beekeepers usually treat their hives prophylactically, whether symptoms are there or not, risking contamination of the hive products with chemicals, debilitating the colony and indirectly encouraging the development of chemical resistance among the pathogens. We were therefore encouraged to develop a disease diagnosis system based on two prepositions: that each disease or parasite infestation can be detected serologically at subclinical levels, i.e. before overt symptoms appear, and that adult bees are either hosts or asymptomatic carriers of all honeybee diseases. Validation of these prepositions would mean that diseases can be detected and treated before epidemic levels are reached, and that the status of a colony can be assessed without necessarily opening the hives, through analysis of adult bees. The final step would be to design a detection kit based on these principles that is accessible to individual beekeepers.
Species 1: Apis mellifera (honey bee)
Species 2: Nosema apis (Nosema)
Species 3: Acarapis woodi (tracheal mite)
Keywords: honeybee, immunochromatography
The ESA 2001 Annual Meeting - 2001: An Entomological Odyssey of ESA