METHOD OF LIFETIME DIAGNOSTICS AND DETERMINATION OF THE DEGREE OF HONEYBEES AFFECTION WITH VARROOSIS Russian patent published in 2023 - IPC A01K51/00 G01N33/48 

FIELD: beekeeping; veterinary medicine.

SUBSTANCE: invention relates to carrying out diagnostic and therapeutic measures for bee varroosis. The method of in vivo diagnostics and determination of the degree of varroosis of honey bees includes sampling from the family and counting the identified mites. Bees in the bezplodny period are selected in a plastic bag for 30–50 individuals from each street from the edge to the center of the nest, more than 200 individuals from the family. A plastic bag with bees is placed in water with a temperature of 0 to +4°C for 30–45 minutes before bees immobilization. Next, the bees are poured out of the bag onto white paper, the walls of the bag are examined for the presence of mites and, if found, they are collected, taking into account them in the total number of mites in the sample. Bees on white paper are laid out in one layer, their number is counted and examined at an ambient temperature of 0 to +4°C. When mites are found on the paper, as well as on the wings of bees, mites are collected and counted. Then each bee is inspected for the presence of varroa mites from the ventral side of the abdomen of the bee. The bee is taken by the head and chest with the thumb and forefinger of the left hand, and the last abdominal segment is grabbed with small anatomical tweezers and the bee's abdomen is gently stretched without damaging it in order to see the tick under the tergite. In case of movement of the antennae on the head and the sting of the bee during its examination, the bee must be turned with the abdominal part towards the nail of the researcher's thumb. When a varroa mite is detected, the mite is removed from the body of the bee with tweezers, collected, and all the mites collected in this sample are counted. Next, the calculation is carried out to determine the degree of infestation of bees by the varroa mite as a percentage according to the formula:

,

where: X is the degree of infestation of bees by the varroa mite, expressed as a percentage; a is the number of bees in the sample; b is the number of mites collected from the sample bees. The examined bees in a state of suspended animation are returned back to the plastic bag and removed from suspended animation by placing the bag with the examined bees under temperature conditions of +8…+34 deg.C, and an hour later they are released alive to the family from which the sample was taken.

EFFECT: invention makes it possible to determine the infestation by varroa mite with saving the life of bees, as well as expanding the arsenal of methods of in vivo diagnosis of varroa disease in honey bees.

1 cl, 5 ex