Esmaeil Amiri

• Insect Virologist and honey bee pathology
• Assistant Research/Extension Professor at Mississippi State University

Queen health and quality play a significant role in the survival, expansion, and productivity of honey bee colonies. Nevertheless, modern beekeeping practices, intensified agriculture, and climate change can leave queens vulnerable to diverse stressors. These stressors can exert a negative impact on queens, resulting in a range of morphological and...

Introduction In beekeeping, queen cell size is a critical factor influencing the growth and development of queen bees. It was hypothesized that larger queen cells would produce queens with greater weight, enhanced resilience to heat stress, and higher expression of heat shock proteins ( HSP90 and HSC70 ), leading to improved survival under environm...

Deformed wing virus (DWV) can cause a major disease in honeybees worldwide and has been detected in many other arthropods (S. J. Martin and L. E. Brettell, Annu Rev Virol 6:49–69, 2019, https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-virology-092818-015700). The presence and replication of DWV in Solenopsis invicta (red fire ant) wer...

Queen rearing is a common beekeeping practice that plays a crucial role in modern apiculture. To enhance the efficiency of the queen rearing process, plastic queen cell cups have gained widespread popularity amongst queen producers. However, concerns have arisen regarding the potential adverse effects of these petrochemical-based products on queen...

Deformed wing virus (DWV) has long been identified as a critical pathogen affecting honeybees, contributing to colony losses through wing deformities, neurological impairments, and reduced lifespan. Since DWV also affects other pollinators, it poses a significant threat to global pollination networks. While honeybees have been the focal point of DW...

Environmental variation selects for the adaptive plasticity of maternal provisioning. Even though developing honeybees find themselves in a protected colony environment, their reproductively specialized queens actively adjust their maternal investment, even among worker-destined eggs. However, the potentially adaptive consequences of this flexible...

Simple Summary Deformed wing virus (DWV) is a major honey bee pathogen found throughout the world. DWV, in association with the varroa mite, causes wing deformity, a shortened abdomen, and neurological impairments, leading to the mortality of millions of honey bee colonies worldwide. At least 12 ant species have been shown to harbor DWV, including...

Reproduction involves the investment of resources into offspring. Although variation in reproductive effort often affects the number of offspring, adjustments of propagule size are also found in numerous species, including the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera. However, the proximate causes of these adjustments are insufficiently understood, especi...

Declining insect populations emphasize the importance of understanding the drivers underlying reductions in insect fitness. Here, we investigated viruses as a threat to social insect reproduction, using honey bees as a model species. We report that in two independent surveys (N = 93 and N = 54, respectively) of honey bee (Apis mellifera) queens tak...

Plecia nearctica Hardy, commonly referred to as lovebugs, is a species of march fly with a subtropical American distribution. The northern range limits of P. nearctica could alter due to climate change, which is a worldwide issue. It has been reported that flowers utilized by P. nearctica are not visited by pollinators, which may negatively impact...

Egg size plasticity represents an adaptive reproductive strategy in numerous organisms, including the honey bee, Apis mellifera . However, the proximate causation of this plasticity and egg size in general is unknown. We show that honey bee queens predictably and reversibly adjust egg size in response to their colony size and that this plasticity i...

Declining insect populations emphasize the importance of understanding the drivers underlying reductions in insect fitness. Here, we investigated viruses as a threat to social insect reproduction, using honey bees as a model species. We report that in a sample of N = 93 honey bee ( Apis mellifera ) queens from nine beekeeping operations across a wi...

Declining global insect populations emphasize the importance of understanding the drivers underlying reductions in insect fitness. Many insects are subject to a trade-off between reproduction and immune activity, meaning that infections can have indirect impacts on fecundity, even in the absence of overt symptoms. While eusocial insects have escape...

While managed honey bees are not fully domesticated compared to other livestock systems, beekeepers share many of the challenges associated with animal husbandry. Specifically, the intensification of beekeeping practices, high densities of beehives, and introduced exotic parasites have elevated parasites and pathogens to be among the top management...

Among numerous viruses that infect honey bees (Apis mellifera), Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) can be linked to severe honey bee health problems. Breeding for virus resistance may improve honey bee health. To evaluate the potential for this approach, we compared the survival of IAPV infection among stocks from the U.S. We complemented the sur...

Trans-generational disease effects include vertical pathogen transmission but also immune priming to enhance offspring immunity. Accordingly, the survival consequences of maternal virus infection can vary and its molecular consequences during early development are poorly understood. The honey bee queen is long-lived and represents the central hub f...

Numerous studies have recently reported on the discovery of bee viruses in different arthropod species and their possible transmission routes, vastly increasing our understanding of these viruses and their distribution. Here, we review the current literature on the recent advances in understanding the transmission of viruses, both on the presence o...

Honey bee research is believed to be influenced dramatically by colony collapse disorder (CCD) and the sequenced genome release in 2006, but this assertion has never been tested. By employing text-mining approaches, research trends were tested by analyzing over 14,000 publications during the period of 1957 to 2017. Quantitatively, the data revealed...

The honey bee queen is the central hub of a colony to produce eggs and release pheromones to maintain social cohesion. Among many environmental stresses, viruses are a major concern to compromise the queen’s health and reproductive vigor. Viruses have evolved numerous strategies to infect queens either via vertical transmission from the queens’ par...

Social evolution has led to distinct life‐history patterns in social insects, but many colony‐level and individual traits, such as egg size, are not sufficiently understood. Thus, a series of experiments was performed to study the effects of genotypes, colony size, and colony nutrition on variation in egg size produced by honey bee (Apis mellifera)...

It has been brought to our attention that one note was missing in the Funding section of our published paper [...]

Queen loss or failure is an important cause of honey bee colony loss. A functional queen is essential to a colony, and the queen is predicted to be well protected by worker bees and other mechanisms of social immunity. Nevertheless, several honey bee pathogens (including viruses) can infect queens. Here, we report a series of experiments to test ho...

Exceptional natural phenomena, such as those that occur during a total solar eclipse, provide unique opportunities to study animal behavior outside the naturally evolved context, which can be informative in more general terms. Circumstantial descriptions of abnormal animal behavior during solar eclipses abound, although scientific studies conducted...

Transgenerational effects have proven important in many species but have been largely ignored in honey bees and other social insects. Several mechanisms produce transgenerational effects and the fitness consequences can be positive or negative. The most prominent medium for transgenerational effects is the egg, which provides the offspring with nut...

Deformed wing virus (DWV) is an important pathogen in a broad range of insects, including honey bees. Concordant with the spread of Varroa, DWV is present in the majority of honey bee colonies and can result in either low-level infections with asymptomatic bees that nonetheless exhibit increased colony loss under stress, or high-level infections wi...

DWV and SBV titers in different experiment. The virus titer for the three experiments are deposited in the supplementary file. (XLSX)

The queen is the sole reproductive female in a healthy honey bee colony. The presence of a healthy and high-quality queen is a key factor in colony survival. Queen quality is a quantitative and qualitative measure of a queen’s reproductive potential, which could be influenced by her genetic background, her mating success, as well as her development...

Western honey bees, Apis mellifera, live in highly eusocial colonies that are each typically headed by a single queen. The queen is the sole reproductive female in a healthy colony, and because long-term colony survival depends on her ability to produce a large number of offspring, queen health is essential for colony success. Honey bees have recen...

Among the factors causing honeybee colony loss, failure or loss of the queen is considered an important factor. It is believed that the queen is well protected by nurse worker bees leading to lower exposure to infectious diseases in the colony. Nevertheless, existing colony pathogens including viruses can infect the queen. In this project, we used...

Deformed wing virus is an important contributor to honey bee colony losses. Frequently queen failure is reported as a cause for colony loss. Here we examine whether sexual transmission during multiple matings of queens is a possible way of virus infection in queens. In an environment with high prevalence of deformed wing virus, queens (n = 30) were...

In honey bees, multiple mating of queens with often more than 20 drones, known as polyandry, is extreme. At the colony level, polyandry can provide fitness gains through better division of labor and disease resistance. For the honey bee queen polyandry may pose a risk, for instance through sexually transmitted diseases. Deformed wing virus (DWV) is...

Honey bee virus prevalence data are an essential prerequisite for managing epidemic events in a population. A survey study was carried out for seven viruses in colonies representing a healthy Danish honey bee population. In addition, colonies from apiaries with high level Varroa infestation or high level of winter mortality were also surveyed. Resu...

Hygienic behaviour in the honey bee, Apis mellifera, is the uncapping and removal of dead, diseased or infected brood from sealed cells by worker bees. We determined the effect of hygienic behaviour on varroa population growth and incidence of deformed wing virus (DWV), which can be transmitted by varroa. We treated 42 broodless honey bee colonies...

Honey bee colony losses have risen seriously in the past decade, especially in the USA. In Europe, average loss rates appear less dramatic and high losses occur less frequently; still, high losses may happen on a regional scale. Scientists and beekeepers are struggling to find answers to this problem. Queen loss and infertility is frequently consid...

The aim is to demonstrate the genetic architecture of milk, fat, protein yield and somatic cell score (SCS) using Illumina BovineSNP50 Beadchip as well as identification of chromosomes or genomic regions influence these traits in German Holstein population. 2333 German Holstein bulls were genotyped with analyzing of 43,838 known position SNPs dist...

An international collaborative experiment was run from 2009 to 2012 (Costa et al., 2012) with the aim of understanding genotype-environment effects on survival and health status of honey bee colonies headed by queens of different European origins that were tested in various locations under differing environmental conditions. No chemical treatment a...

Diseases are known to be one of the major contributors to colony losses. Within a Europe-wide experiment on genotype - environment interactions, an initial 621 colonies were set up and maintained from 2009 to 2012. The colonies were monitored to investigate the occurrence and levels of key pathogens. These included the mite Varroa destructor (mites...

Chronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV) is known as a disease of worker honey bees. To investigate pathogenesis of the CBPV on the queen, the sole reproductive individual in a colony, we conducted experiments regarding the susceptibility of queens to CBPV. Results from susceptibility experiment showed a similar disease progress in the queens compared to...

High rate of ovulation and litter size are the most important affecting factors in reproduction system and subsequently increases economical efficiency in sheep breeding industry. This study was carried out for detection of mutation in FecB and FecXI genes in Lori-Bakhtiari sheep breed. It has been reported that these major genes can increase ovula...