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Notes from the Lab

Managing Tropilaelaps via cultural and chemical controls

- January 1, 2025 - Scott McArt - (excerpt)

Pretty much every beekeeper in my orbit is asking me about Tropilaelaps mercedesae (from here forward called Tropilaelaps; see Photo 1). In fact, as I sit down to write this month’s column, outgoing American Beekeeping Federation (ABF) president Dan Winter just left the Dyce Lab and Tropilaelaps was a big part of our conversation for the past hour and a half.

As with all novel honey bee pests, the question isn’t if it will arrive, the question is when it will arrive. This has been true for EFB, AFB, small hive beetle, tracheal mites, varroa, and others. Tropilaelaps will be the same.

So, should beekeepers throw up their hands and give up? Or are there effective methods of controlling Tropilaelaps? These are the topics for the eighty-second Notes from the Lab, where I summarize “Managing the parasitic honey bee mite Tropilaelaps mercedesae through combined cultural and chemical control methods,” published in Scientific Reports [2024] and written by Rogan Tokach and colleagues at Auburn University with help from co-authors at Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

Before we get into their experiment, let’s cover some basic history regarding Tropilaelaps. The giant honey bees of Asia (Apis dorsata and A. laboriosa) are believed to be the original hosts of Tropilaelaps. The western honey bee (Apis mellifera) was introduced to Asia and was probably quickly parasitized by Tropilaelaps, which made a host switch from A. dorsata/laboriosa to A. mellifera. The exact timing of when this occurred is unknown.

What is known is that Tropilaelaps is hitching a ride on A. mellifera and expanding far beyond the historic range of the giant honey bees, including outside of Southeast Asia (see Figure 1). There are new confirmed cases as far east as Russia and Georgia (the country, thankfully, not the USA state!), and as far south as Papua New Guinea.

With the spread in Tropilaelaps on everyone’s mind, a team at Auburn University, led by Dr. Geoff Williams, recently led a series of workshops to help educate and prepare U.S. apiary inspectors. Alongside colleagues at Chiang Mai University, they hosted Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and ABF leaders in northern Thailand in January 2024. Then they followed up the Thailand-based training by hosting AIA members, as well as ABF and American Honey Producers Association (AHPA) leaders, at Auburn in November 2024. This work was sponsored by USDA APHIS, Project Apis m., North Dakota Department of Agriculture, and Alabama Department of Agriculture & Industries. One output of those activities was an online resource page that includes a distribution map, images, and videos pertaining to Tropilaelaps, which can be found at https://www.honeybeepests.org/tropi

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