Poor little bee. So Jean, where is it on this bee that…?

 

Ok. I think if you looked even with a naked eye. Just to the side of the abdomen. 

 

Yes, oh, on the belly there. 

 

That grape red colored. 

 

Ok, it looks like here it’s carrying a football on its stomach.

 

It’s huge. It’s at least 2mm across.

 

And it’s just hanging on there and they sort of feed on the…

 

Puncture the soft tissue and then start feeding on the 

 

Feed on the bodily fluids. 

 

That’s right. I know from bitter experience, when you find one of those, you’re gonna been in big trouble, cause they can pretty much wipe out a colony in a couple of months. 

 

A really short time, yeah, it’s the kiss of death, isn’t it?

 

Jean Devonshire uses one of the most powerful instruments in her lab, a scanning electron microscope. She freezes the bee with liquid nitrogen, then coats it with an ultra-fine layer of conducted gold. Now we can view every tiny detail of our enemy. 

 

What we are looking at now in the center of the image there is the actual Varroa, and if I focus it finer, we can see the heads on the body obviously very easily, there you can see these sternal plates, and the Varroa sitting in the center.

 

And the head is digging in there, so it’s feeding now. 

 

It’s probably, it’s probably yeah, the Varroa knows if it slides itself underneath these plates, it can actually puncture the soft tissue parts. 

 

The Varroa mite arrived in the UK in 1992. Its spread has generally been linked to infected bees being imported around the world. And our bees had no resistance. 

 

Once it’s finished munching, it leaves these open sores which then leaves the bee open to infection, so it’s a clever little thing, isn’t it?

 

It is.