At Virginia Tech’s teaching apiary in Blacksburg, the sound of buzzing bees blends with children playing outside at a nearby elementary school. James Wilson is getting hives ready for Virginia Tech students; they learn to care for bees here at this research station.
In addition to teaching students, Wilson also does outreach with hobbyist beekeepers across Virginia. A majority of his work includes how to manage an invasive pest, called the varroa mite, which is currently the biggest threat to bee populations around the world.
Now another mite, called tropilaelaps, is currently spreading across honeybee populations in Europe. “And now we can see that that mite can jump onto the European honeybee and wreak havoc from there,” Wilson said.
Beekeepers have been on the lookout for tropilaelaps for years, but there was a close call last fall when inspectors found the mites on a container ship on its way from India to New Jersey.
“So that was a potential landfall moment that was avoided. People are on the alert and looking out for it,” Wilson said.
Researchers across the U.S. are currently collaborating with scientists in Southeast Asia to find the best ways to treat this new threat, in case it does make it to the United States.
Dan Aurell is an entomology researcher at Auburn University in Alabama. He and a team of researchers in the United States and Thailand published a study in 2024, evaluating one method of treating the spread of tropilaelaps mites in beehives, by reducing larvae and developing bees in a hive. This is done by caging the queen bee and preventing her from laying eggs for a time.
“Introducing brood breaks like this is extremely effective, but it is also quite labor intensive,” Aurell said.
Aurell explains this works because tropilaelaps mites only eat young bees, not adults.
“They are extremely dependent on honeybee brood, for their food and reproduction. If you can interrupt the presence of developing bees, then that’s the tropilaelaps mites’ Achilles heal. We can starve them out.”
This method is not effective at treating varroa mites, because they feed on adult bees, in addition to the brood.
Aurell points out that compared with varroa mites, very little research has been conducted on tropilaelaps, and more knowledge is needed for ways to treat infestation, in case these pests do make it to the United States.
James Wilson agrees, and says though he’s optimistic, he is concerned for what tropilaelaps could mean for American honeybees.
“It could be much more impactful than just varroa,” Wilson said. “And that’s saying something, because we assume with these colonies in front of us, if we left them untreated, most of them would die out in two, maybe three years, at most, just from the pressure of varroa mites.”
