Animaps: Varroa Honeybee Mite

Varroa (Acari: Varroidae) is a parasitic mite that poses a serious threat to the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) . This mite, related to ticks, feeds on adult and larval honeybees, obtaining nourishment from their blood and the fat bodies carried in the bees’ bloodstream. Existing records provide information as to where Varroa mites were sighted, by country, and when they were first sighted, by year. Some of the data sets are more accurate than others, but location by country and by year only is itself a rough, but useful, spatial display. Arlinghaus created the original mapped set, up to 1998, in order to support her idea to make an animated map to clearly display the global spread of the Varroa mite and other phenomena across the Earth. She used data from Sammataro for one of these ‘animaps’. In terms of timing, the data set had information for some, but not all, of the years in the course of the original study.