Lake Sinai Virus in bees
April 10, 2024
- John Mackay, Technical Director
We always find ourselves working on things that can harbour a lot of different viruses – and bees definitely fall in to that group. It was the published report of Deformed Wing Virus causing major overwintering losses, more than 10 years ago, that got us to set up the first bee virus testing PCR panel in New Zealand.
I’d bore you with the story of how that got me into beekeeping but that’s for another time.
We have a few weird and wonderful virus and bacterial assays that we’ve designed and worked up into tests – many using synthetic controls because the viruses weren’t known to be present in NZ (e.g. DWV B and C or Solinvivirus-1 reported last year in the USA). One of the virus groups we’ve been working on for a few years is known as the Lake Sinai Virus group. We say ‘group’ because a number of different strains have been identified over the past 10 years, imaginatively named LSV-1 to 7.
Many viruses in bees have no obvious (overt) symptoms – they may originate from other species such as wasps or bumblebees and be detected only peripherally in honeybees. While some strains of the LSV group have an unknown effect, LSV-2 has been shown to be linked with (but not necessarily cause) weaker colonies.
Our research assay that we have run across many bee samples detects (but does not differentiate) the strains LSV1 to 5 – we were interested to see the total virus loading from this group (and this was before strains 6 and 7 were reported). Recently reported in Korea last month with high prevalence, the virus group is also prevalent in NZ bees and Korea have also confirmed the linkage of higher levels of LSV-2 with winter losses. We do have research tests for the different strains but these are not amenable to higher throughput testing . . . but we’re now going to be looking closer at our test for LSV-2.
