Abebe Jenberie Wubie

Bahir Dar University · Program Animal Production

This study reports for the first-time managed honey bee colony loss rates and associated risk factors during the active beekeeping season 2022/2023 in nine Sub-Saharan African countries, namely Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Benin, Liberia, Nigeria, Cameroon and Democratic Republic of the Congo. The sustainability of bee swarm catches as a main h...

Apiculture has a well-recognized role in enhancing food security by pollination services around the globe. Besides, apiculture is an extremely valuable income-generating and job-creating activity for millions of men, women, and youths across Africa through trade of hive products, especially honey. However, the yields of honey and other hive product...

The study was conducted in Gozamen District, East Gojjam Zone, Amhara Region, Ethiopia, from September 2017 to July 2018 to determine honey quality produced in the area.The effects of Agro-ecological Zones (location) and hive type on honey quality in the study area were assessed.Questionnaires for the survey, laboratory analysis for honey quality w...

Innate immune systems are key defenses of animals and are particular important in species that lack the sophisticated adaptive immune systems as found in vertebrates. Here, we were interested to quantify variation in innate immune responses of insects in hosts that differ in their parasite susceptibility. To do this, we studied immune responses in...

Chalkbrood disease in honeybees, caused by Ascosphaera apis (Onygenales: Ascosphaeraceae), exclusively affects brood. Restricted Enzyme-Mediated Integration (REMI) was used to construct stable A. apis transformants to investigate the infectivity of transformed pathogens to honeybee larvae. PCR, Clustal W sequence alignment, and Southern blot analys...

The honeybee is one of the most valuable insect pollinators, playing a key role in pollinating wild vegetation and agricultural crops, with significant contribution to the world’s food production. Although honeybees have long been studied as model for social evolution, honeybee biology at the molecular level remained poorly understood until the yea...

The mandibular glands (MGs) of honeybee workers are vital for the secretion of lipids, for both larval nutrition and pheromones. However, knowledge of how the proteome controls MG development and functionality at the different physiological stages of worker bees is still lacking. We characterized and compared the proteome across different ages of M...

Varroa destructor has been identified as a major culprit responsible for the losses of millions of honeybee colonies. Varroa sensitive hygiene (VSH) is a suite of behaviors from adult bees to suppress mite reproduction by uncapping and/or removing mite infested pupae from sealed brood. Despite the efforts to elucidate the molecular underpinnings of...

Ascosphaera apis (Onygenales: Ascosphaeraceae) is a chalkbrood causing pathogen in honeybees. Recently, chemicals have been used against this disease. Consequently, the abuseof chemicals has caused serious impacts on the environment and honey quality and on honeybee colonies themselves. Therefore, the search for biological control options should be...

At present, due to various reasons, the honeybee colony population is certainly in a state of continuous decline, and absconding is becoming the major problem against beekeeping development. As a result, it is becoming more difficult to obtain adequate swarms every year to start and expand an apiary. Furthermore, farmers in the area are also compla...

Beekeeping serves as a source of additional cash income for hundreds of thousands of farmer beekeepers in the country and plays a significant role in conserving the natural resources and contributes to the globe through environmental protection. Furthermore, even if the potential and success in beekeeping development is dependent first and foremost...

Current need for genetic engineering for Ascosphaera apis and absence of reports have initiated us to target development of an efficient and reproducible protocol to make this fungus amenable to genetic studies and transformation. The fungus was isolated from chalkbrood mummies and checked for its identity. Different enzymolysis and osmotic pressur...

Wax moths are ubiquitous pests of honey bee colonies that destroy beeswax combs. To study the efficiency of different preventing techniques in local conditions, five treatments were assigned to purposively selected wax moth susceptible colonies. The results have revealed that 66.7% of the colonies have absconded from control treatments due to wax m...

Sensory neuron membrane protein (SNMP) is an olfactory receptor with photoaffinity analogs, capable of binding the pheromone membrane protein receptor deduced from receptor membrane protein with the pheromone–pheromone binding protein complex. However, this hypothesis has not yet been experimentally verified. In this experiment, the cDNA sequence e...

Chalkbrood is an invasive mycosis in honeybees caused by Ascosphaera apis (Maasen ex Claussen) L. S. Olive & Spiltoir, that exclusively affects honeybee brood. The disease causes about 5 - 37% reduction in honey production in the world and 80% brood death. The severity of the disease, these days, has increased pesticide use and frequent long-distan...

Oxytetracycline (OTC) has the potential to bring severe side effects to humans, when taken from its residues. The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) technique has long been known as a rapid, sensitive, specific and cost-effective analytical method, and has been used for diagnostic and residue detection purposes for many years. However, there...