The use of antibiotics is not permitted in Switzerland; moreover, no other medication exists to combat European foul brood. Hives with symptoms must therefore be destroyed in order to limit the outbreak, and the contaminated material must be sanitised. Since prevention is the best cure, early detection is desirable. Numerous studies have been undertaken and documents have been created at the Swiss Bee Research Centre and elsewhere to draw the attention of beekeepers to these problems and inform them about the causes and the control measures to be implemented.
Momeni J., Parejo M., Nielsen R. O., Lang J., Montes I., Papoutsis, Farajzadeh L., Bendixen C., Căuia E., Charrière J.-D., Coffey M. F., Costa C., Dall'Olio R., De la Rúa P., Drazic M. M., Filipi J., Gaela T., Golubovski M., Gregorc A., Grigoryan K., Hatjina F., Ilyasov R., Ivanova E., Janashia I., Kandemir I., Karatasou A., Kekecoglu M., Kezic N., Matray E. S., Mifsud D., Moosbeckhofer R., Nikolenko A. G., Papachristoforou A., Petrov P., Pinto M. A., Poskryakov A. V., Sharipov A. Y., Siceanu A., Soysal M. I., Uzunov A., Zammit-Mangion M., Vingborg R., Bouga M., Kryger P., Meixner M. D., Estonba A.
Authoritative subspecies diagnosis tool for European honey bees based on ancestry informative SNPs.
With numerous endemic subspecies representing four of its five evolutionary lineages, Europe holds a large fraction of Apis mellifera genetic diversity. This diversity and the natural distribution range have been altered by anthropogenic factors. The conservation of this natural heritage relies on the availability of accurate tools for subspecies diagnosis. Based on pool-sequence data from 2145 worker bees representing 22 populations sampled across Europe, we employed two highly discriminative approaches (PCA and FST) to select the most informative SNPs for ancestry inference.
