First report of sacbrood virus in honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies in Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Sacbrood disease, an affliction of honey bees (Apis mellifera) characterized by brood that fails to pupate and subsequently dies, is an important threat to honey bee health. The disease is caused by the sacbrood virus (SBV), a positive-, single-stranded RNA virus in the order Picornavirales. Because of the economic importance of honey bees for both pollination and honey production, it is vital to understand and monitor the spread of viruses such as SBV. This virus has been found in many places across the globe, including recently in some South American countries, and it is likely that it will continue to spread. We performed a preliminary study to search for SBV in two apiaries of Africanized honey bees in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, using RT-PCR and Sanger sequencing and found the first evidence of SBV in honey bee colonies in Brazil. The virus was detected in larvae, foraging and nurse bees from two colonies, one of which had symptoms of sacbrood disease, at the beginning of the winter season in June 2011. No SBV was found in samples from nine other nearby colonies.

Atypical viral and parasitic pattern in Algerian honey bee subspecies Apis mellifera intermissa and A. m. sahariensis

“…In contrast to the relatively high prevalence observed in this country, ABPV was absent or rare in surveys performed in Uganda, South Africa, Kenya and Benin (Kajobe et al 2010;Strauss et al 2013;Muli et al 2014;Amakpe et al 2015). As in other African or Africanized honey bee populations (Freiberg et al 2012;Strauss et al 2013;, SBV was rarely detected in our samples, contrasting with studies in other parts of the world (Tentcheva et al 2004;Ai et al 2012;Chen et al 2006;Antùnez et al 2006;Reynaldi et al 2010).…”

Honeybee health in South America

“…Later, these same viruses were detected in Brazil with the exception of CBPV (Teixeira et al 2008;Freiberg et al 2012), and in Argentina (Reynaldi et al 2010;Brasesco et al 2013), and in Chile, with the exception of CBPV (Barriga et al 2012;Rodríguez et al 2012Rodríguez et al , 2014. RNA viruses were detected in colonies from apiaries with antecedents of colony losses and in apiaries without clinical symptoms of diseases as well.…”

Phylogenetic analysis of the honeybee Sacbrood virus

“…This sequence's 8.8kb geome contains a large open reading frame encoding structural proteins VP1, VP2, and VP3, to compose the virus capsid. Sacbrood virus can infect different honeybee species and has been found in different geographical areas, including the USA (Ghosh et al, 1999), South America (Antunez et al, 2005Freiberg et al, 2012), Europe (Bakonyi et al, 2002;Tentcheva et al, 2004), Australia (Anderson et al, 1988), South Africa (Benjeddou et al, 2001), Asia (Bailey et al, 1982;Zhang et al, 2001;Ma et al, 2011;Nguyen et al, 2013), and New Guinea (Roberts & Anderson, 2014). The SBV specifically infecting A. cerana is named CSBV.…”