In the Spring of 1977, while I was living out the last months of my pre-Star Wars childhood, the Rothamsted Experimental Station received a package of honeybees from Egypt. Alive but apparently “diseased”, no description of the disease was given. After putting the goo from the ground-up bees through a series of spins on a centrifuge (the last being through a sucrose gradient), researchers at Rothamsted fired up their electron microscope and observed round viral particles about 30 nanometers across. Antibodies specific for known bee viruses didn’t react with these particles, so they named it Egypt Bee Virus. (1)
And that is the last mention of it for 43 years, sort of – I can find references to it in the introductions of a few papers, but I can’t find that anyone worked on it between now and then. Until this year, when an international group of scientists from Sweden, Germany, Australia, Ethiopia, Belgium, United States, Jordan, India and several different institutions from the United Kingdom, including Rothamsted published a paper to report that the virus is no more – or at least that they can’t find it (2).
Working from freeze dried samples stored at room temperature for ~40+ years at Rothamsted, they reverse transcribed the viral RNA in the samples into cDNA for sequencing. Apparently the originally purified viruses from 1977 had been used to infect honeybee pupae and that was the material that was freeze dried, although there is no publication describing the results of those infections (its only reported in the materials and methods of this paper). They find that the Egypt Bee Virus is highly related to the Deformed Wing Viruses. Overall its more closely related to DWV-C than A or B, but it has 2 segments where it’s clearly more related to DWV-A and DWV-B (separately) (2)
Egypt Bee Virus is clearly its own virus
They rename Egypt Bee Virus as Deformed Wing Virus-D (although there is no evidence that it ever caused deformed wings).
Then they screen 300 separate RNA sequence libraries from all over the world for DWV-D – and they find nothing! Although none of the libraries are from Egypt, 10 of them are from Ethiopia, which is at least near Egypt- but then again there is no published information about exactly where those bees were from, only that they were shipped from Egypt in 1977. Finally, the 1979 paper first describing EBV thanks a “Professor S E Rashad of Cairo University” and I found a 1978 article by Rashad, SE and El-Sarrag, MSA in “Bee World” entitled “Beekeeping in Sudan” (3), which at least borders Egypt and Ethiopia.
I kind of hope this virus is gone… there are many that can replace it, and it’s unlikely it was doing anything useful for anyone, but its absolutely fascinating how viruses can come and go. Something many people have been thinking about lately as Alpha, then Beta, then Delta and now Omicron arise and then disappear.
As a sort of side-quest I keep coming back to this Professor S E Rashad, whose full name is Salah El-Din Rashad. I don’t want to glorify war, but that’s a pretty bad-ass name (look it up). It interests me that in 1977, this guy sends the samples from which the UK scientists discover Egypt Bee Virus, but he isn’t listed as an author. In my experience in science, that kind of thing wasn’t uncommon – submitting samples to someone else frequently doesn’t mean you are made an author on the papers describing whatever they discover using those samples. But I am sure its also part of another thing that isn’t uncommon: cutting scientists from less advantaged countries out of authorship. I did a bit more research on Professor Rashad – he was clearly interacting with UK scientists because he was at a 1976 conference on Apiculture in Tropical Climates in London. Ultimately the decision on authorship is typically left up to the scientists who are writing and submitting the paper, and its nice to see that researchers in Ethiopia are included as authors on the 2022 paper of Egypt Bee Virus.
References
(1) Bailey et al 1979 Journal of General Virology. Egypt Bee Virus and Australian Isolates of Kashmir Bee Virus
(2) de Miranda et al 2022 Virology Journal. Cold case: The disappearance of Egypt bee virus, a fourth distinct master strain of deformed wing virus linked to honeybee mortality in 1970’s Egypt
(3) Rashad & El-Sarrag. 1978 Bee World. Beekeeping in Sudan