Do You Want to Participate in Creating Varroa Resistant Bees?

Read this article by the Secretary of the Australian Queen Bee Breeders Association (AQBBA), Peter Czeti to learn how Aussie queen breeders aim to shorten the time it takes to produce varroa resistant bees. If you or your club want to participate, email biosecurity@beekeepers.asn.au

The Australian VSH Collective.

The Australian Queen Bee Breeders’ Association (AQBBA) is establishing an industry-led breeding program to identify, develop and promote varroa resistant bees in Australia. The foundation of this program was a small consortium of AQBBA members who invested their own time and money to bring tools and assessment techniques to Australia to identify candidate stock with the potential to develop into bees with varroa sensitive hygiene (VSH) traits. This consortium commenced work in early 2023 and identified stock from testing 500-600 colonies across NSW and QLD using a pre-market release of Optera’s Unhealthy Brood Odour (UBeeO) product as a screening tool. This tool measures honeybee uncapping responses to a selection of pheromones that are symptomatic of brood infestation by varroa and uses this as an indication of VSH potential. Ten colonies were selected and crossed with other commercially valuable stock using instrumental insemination (II) and the resulting progeny were again screened with UBeeO and high scoring breeder queens distributed to the consortium participants.

The importance of breeding resistant bees as the basis of varroa management is a well-understood fact around the World. In Australia, progress has been slow and funding for breeding remains scarce. This is due partly to the current priorities of the national emergency industry response and the need to articulate the requirements and direction for the breeding program itself. The recently released National Honeybee Breeding Strategy by Agrifutures has provided some of the higher order direction and the AQBBA is progressing contributing programs to support the national strategy.

Varroa Resistant Comb Thumb

One such program is the Australian VSH Collective. The Collective is a “grass-roots” program for broadening the base of queen bee breeders and producers in every region of Australia where bees are kept and have agricultural value. Presently, demand for queen bees regularly outstrips supply. It is anticipated that the looming impact of varroa on the Australian Honeybee industry will likely impact the businesses of many breeders who may elect to leave the industry in coming years. This will not only exacerbate the shortage of queen bees but further concentrate ongoing production (and genetics) in the hands of even fewer breeders.

US Map
Figure 2 - On average, 93 percent of US honey bees belong to a single north Mediterranean C lineage (Source: US Dept of Agriculture)

The Collective aims to offset this decline by making queen bee breeding and production more accessible to both commercial and recreational beekeepers as well as promoting a geographically decentralised model that helps sustain genetic diversity in Australia’s European honeybee population. This is an important, yet rarely discussed matter. Bees are the most “out-bred” organism of any animal or plant on Earth. This means that the random mixing of genetics among bees is a critical aspect of their long-term survivability as a species. Yet much of how we breed and produce bees is almost diametrically opposed to what evolution has found to be most suitable for honeybee survival. In the United States, 77 percent of honeybee populations are closely related sharing the same two haplotypes when hundreds of these haplotypes are present in a healthy genetically diverse wild populations.

This could be a problem in Australia as well if we don’t capture as much honeybee diversity (including wild honeybees) as possible before varroa wipes out this diversity. To address this important aspect, the AQBBA has partnered with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in a bid to Agrifutures proposing a four year research program to support VSH honey bee queen breeding and to establish a genetic baseline against which diversity can be measured, improved and promote the ongoing genetic “health” of Australian honeybee stocks.

Going forward, the intent is that the VSH Collective will establish two to three “core” teams based around commercial operators in each State as the foundation for breeding and selection programs within the genetic context of their respective regions. We hope these core teams can be supplemented by recreational beekeepers in adjoining regions who can voluntarily assist in the work of the core team and/or establish their own research apiaries based around further dispersed local recreational beekeeping associations and communities – again with the added benefit from the inclusion of varied genetics in the breeding program. Scale is required at some stage in the program to ensure that selection pressure is applied to as large a population as possible to help accelerate trait identification and selection. This is the job of the core teams - selecting the best performers from, say 1000 colonies, to identify bees with traits demonstrating varroa resistance sooner as opposed to selecting from 10 colonies which will take much longer. Smaller, dispersed research apiaries run by recreational beekeepers can take the stock from the core teams, mix it with their local genetics and pass this back to the core team to maintain genetic diversity. In this way, commercial and recreational beekeepers can work together to accelerate the realisation of varroa resistance while reducing the chances of genetic bottle-necking. As varroa resistance is identified in the various honeybee populations in which the breeding program is being undertaken, this information can be fed back to the genetic evaluation services proposed under the National Honeybee Breeding Strategy and the genetics shared among the broader group of participants to maintain diversity where it makes sense

Participation in the VSH Collective would require:

  1. Membership of the AQBBA ($100/year) - primarily to help continue the management of the VSH Collective and collection, instrumental insemination and re-distribution of breeding stock.
  2. Establishment and maintenance of a research apiary in a location where varroa is endemic – ideally, not less than 20 colonies but the more the better – maybe 100+ colonies if possible.
  3. Have sufficient resources to form a team consisting of:
    • Skilled beekeepers who have practical experience of raising their own queens and distribute stock for sharing around the program.
    • Other beekeepers who can maintain the research apiary, undertake the observations and collect data

These requirements are a lot to ask of recreational beekeepers but the AQBBA would seek to link up research apiaries with commercial beekeeping operations involved as “core teams” in the VSH collective.

Varroa Resistant Body 650
Figure 3 - VSH Research Apiary near Newcastle NSW

The AQBBA would expect that participants:

  1. Commit to a program of work lasting 4 years.
  2. Draw on the progenitor VSH stock and contribute back into the pool to improve quality and maintain diversity.
  3. Employ the program methods and techniques for mating and selection as well as contribute to the improvement of these techniques.
  4. Include UBeeO testing and any genetic testing as required by the VSH Collective. This testing would be funded by the AQBBA. This does not exclude other techniques as determined by participants which the AQBBA would be funded by participants.

An ABA participant could expect the following from participation in the program:

  1. Access to high quality and (eventually) varroa resistant queens for their own use.
  2. Opportunities to gain new skills and expertise in queen bee breeding and rearing.
  3. Position participants to be in a position to attain the BQUAL/BTRACE VSH Queen Breeder certification and commercially sell VSH queens.
  4. Be part of an important national agricultural initiative to help secure Australia’s food supply with the benefits gained from the sharing of information, training and experience.

At the end of the program in four years the AQBBA aims to establish a “certification” for VSH stock in Australia. This certification will be in the form of skills and practices by the breeder/beekeeper on one hand (progressed through the BQUAL/BTRACE program. We also seek to have a certification process for the bees themselves. This requires further investigation in terms of process and certification authority. We would ask participants not to sell queens as “VSH-certified” until we have worked this out – hopefully by the end of the program.