Honey bees are the most significant pollinators of plants worlwide.
Importance of plant pollination widely exceeds all other economic benefits of
modern beekeeping such as production of honey, Royal jelly, propolis,
beeswax, honeybee venom etc. The issues concerning bees diseases are of
extreme importance in modern commercial beekeeping. That especially regards
to the fact that the number of disease agents in bees has considerably
increased in recent decades. Using international transport, export or import
of bees and their products, the possibility of entering various agents
(parasites, bacterias, viruses and fungi) into bee colonies. In recent years
one of the biggest problems in beekeeping in Asia has become tropilaelaps -
ectoparasitic bee disease caused by mites of the genus Tropilaelaps. But
because of prevalent interest in parasites Varroa destructor and Acarapis
woodi, the threat of mites from Tropileaps family has not been familiar for a
long period of time. Today, Tropilaelaps is on the list of diseases
endangering the whole world, made by OIE. There is a real risk of its
spreading, mostly through trade, that is import of bees, swarms, queen bees,
bee products and equipment. In the Republic of Serbia, this disease was
described for the first time in April-May 1981 in bumblebees and bees in
which a mass infestation with until then unknown parasites was detected. By
additional analysis there was found out that the parasite in question was
from Laelapidae (Mesostigmata) family, Tropilaelaps.