Biology session

The honeybee’s (Apis mellifera) most harmful pest is the Varroa destructor mite, which is becoming a more and more impending danger to beekeepers in Hungary. Some bees can effectively defend themself against this parasite showing hygienic behaviour wherethrough honeybee workers remove the infected/dead pupae and larvae from the hive, thus preventing further infection.

The aim of my thesis is to compare the hygienic honeybee hives with the non-hygienic ones using genomic and genetic methods, so we are able to develop DNA markers for selecting the advantegous lines and families using DNA-based testing on drone brood/brood.

A total of 72 honeybees were collected from different species and from 12 different bee populations. During my work I dissected the flying muscles from the thorax of these honeybees after what I isolated genomic DNA from these and the DNA was of adequate quantity and quality for further usage. Based on the work of Tsuruda et al. (2012) I designed three microsatellite markers for the QTL region which is linked to the varroa mite sensitive behaviour and I optimized them for multiplex PCR system.

The tested markers are working properly and they were proved to be polymorphic in the tested individuals. Later we would like to involve only Carniolan bees (Apis mellifera carnica) in our assay to exclude the aberrances caused by the populationgenetic differences.

The long-term goal of this honeybee genomics survey is to support the domestic beekeepers with genetic data (genetic profiles) thus could improve the breeding of bee families and bee disease resistant populations.