Morphological differentiation and haplotype determination of varroa destructor in honey bees in Elazığ and Malatya provinces

Varroa are ectoparasites that suck hemolymph by penetrating the intersegmental segments of the honey bee cuticle. In studies based on the determination of morphometric characteristics, the identification of the mite is not always reliable due to overlapping measurements with the morphometric parameters of other species of the same family. The aim of this thesis was to perform morphological and molecular species discrimination of Varroa collected from live bees of 20 beekeepers, 10 from the centre and Karakoçan, Kovancılar, Sivrice and Baskil districts of Elazığ and 10 from Arguvan, Arapgir, Battalgazi, Yeşilyurt, Akçadağ and Kale districts of Malatya. The collected mites were measured morphologically under a stereomicroscope for eight different variables including shield length (SL), shield width (SW), genital shield length (GSL), genital shield width (GKG), anal shield length (ASL), anal shield width (ASW), metapodal shield length (MTU) and metapodal shield width (MSW). In addition, a 448 bp mitochondrial CO1 gene region was amplified with primers we designed from the complete mitochondrial genome sequence of Varroa destructor, and this amplified region was then subjected to sequence analysis. In the study, 102 mites collected from Malatya and Elazığ provinces were examined and haplotype and phylogenetic analyses of the mt-CO1 gene sequence were performed. In order to compare the morphometric characteristics of the samples from Malatya and Elazığ provinces, the independent t-test after normality analysis (Shaphiro Wilk) showed a significant difference between the means in terms of GKU, AKU and MKU, while GKU and MKU were higher in Elazığ samples and AKU was higher in Malatya samples. As a result of morphometric examination and sequence analysis of 102 samples, all samples were identified as V. destructor. Of the 102 sequences analysed for haplotypes, 93 were found to be 100% compatible with the Korean haplotype of V. destructor, while 7 of the remaining 9 sequences were found to be separate haplotypes. It was suggested that the 7 haplotypes identified for the first time may be different variants of the Korean haplotype. It was found that the morphometric measurement results and means of the new haplotypes were within the morphometric measurement limits of the Korean haplotype. In addition, the haplotype 1 group, which had a sequence 100% compatible with the Korean 1 haplotype, was also found to be within the upper and lower measurement limits, and no morphological differences were observed in the newly detected haplotypes with the Korean haplotype.