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Honey bees play a key role in agriculture by pollinating crops and producing honey. However, honey bee colonies are struggling to survive the winter due to parasitic mites called Varroa destructor. These mites weaken bees by feeding on them and transmitting viral pathogens.

Currently, there are only four widely used acaricides – targeted pesticide treatments used to eliminate mites from colonies. However, mites have begun to show resistance to one of these treatments and two others are corrosive and difficult to apply. Effective integrated pest management (IPM) schemes mandate that beekeepers rotate between different control methods to prevent mites from becoming resistant to all treatments. But the limitations of the current treatments make this difficult, often forcing beekeepers to repeatedly use the same acaricide.

Researchers from Simon Fraser University (SFU) discovered a new acaricide that can eliminate mites without harming bees or the environment. Ongoing field trials, in collaboration with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, have shown a significant drop in mites in hives treated with the new acaricide compared to untreated hives.

Before a new mite treatment can be approved for use, health authorities require a clear understanding of how it kills mites—its "mode of action”. Successful IPM strategies rely on the rotated treatments having different modes of action. This collaborative project, between SFU and the University of British Columbia, successfully identified specific proteins in the mites that may be disrupted by the new compound. This is a crucial step towards conclusively determining the acaricide’s mode of action.  Using fluorescent dyes that light up affected tissues, the researchers found that the treatment binds to muscles and to fibrous structures likely to be nerves. 

Further work is needed to understand how the new treatment affects bees at a molecular level and how the acaricide is biodegraded by bees, mites and microorganisms in the hive. This project laid the foundation to study the mode of action of the newly discovered acaricide which is a crucial step towards gaining approval for the treatment to be adopted into the accepted IPM strategy to maintain healthy honey bee hives.