A highly-contagious fungal parasite found in bee populations around the globe has been found to quickly and severely impact the mobility of bees and reduces the size of crops they can pollinate.

Nosema apis is a fungus that lives in the gut of honey bees and causes dysentery and weakens them.

When combined with other parasites or stressors, it is described as an important contributor to bee populations around the world. This a Shared news from abc.net.au . You can get more on abc.net.au

Researchers at the University of Western Australia glued 1.5 millimetre long backpacks containing computer devices to 100 infected bees to study the impact of the parasite.

UWA Research Associate Dr Ryan Dosselli from the University's Centre for Integrative Bee Research said the virus impacted bee's mobility quickly.

"What is interesting here in Australia, especially in Western Australia, is that nosema is one of the few diseases of bees that we have, which makes it an unique opportunity for us to understand how it works without other confounding factors in place," he said.

"We need to keep our bees healthy, without bees we do lose about a third of all the food we eat, and that's only looking at the human part of the story.

"We glued very little ... you may call them computer backpacks in order to see how their flight behaviour was effected by the infection.

"We knew that the nosema disease is able to effect the behaviour of bees, what we weren't expecting is that bees almost immediately after getting infected started to do more trips outside of the hive, but maintaining the same exact time per day outside of the hive.

"That means that those bees that were outside looking for food were in fact to some extent trying to cope for the loss of capability of flying around by increasing the number of flights they were doing."

Ensuring bee futures

Dr Dosselli said the finding meant more bees would be needed to pollinate crops.

"The easiest thing you can see from this data is that colonies of bees that are highly effected by nosema will be able to pollinate a smaller area than they would normally be able to," he said.

"If you put a bee colony to pollinate some crops, so for example here in WA they are usually put to pollinate canola crops, you need to know how far the bees can go to pollinate efficiently your crops.

"If their area is reduced, obviously this will impact what they are able to do for us.

"The research is going on this topic because we would like to be able to solve the problem."

Dr Dosselli said he was hopeful scientists would be able to breed bees resistant or better able to cope with nosema.

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