Dirk de Graaf

Prof. dr. Dirk C. de Graaf is a professor at Ghent University, Belgium and director of the collaboration platform Honeybee Valley. He bridges between fundamental bee research and practical beekeeping. Twenty years ago, he introduced the PCR-technology in honey bee disease diagnostics with a PCR for the notifiable disease American foulbrood. The test excels in specificity and speed, reducing the time to confirm an outbreak to just a few hours, where it could previously take up to 2 weeks with classical microbiological techniques. From then on, his focus was mainly on bee pathology. The implementation of next generation sequencing in bee pathogen screening has led to the discovery of novel viruses that infect insect pollinators and has broadened our view of their pathogen load. He also discovered new parasites from honey bees and other pollinators. In last decade he has focussed also on honey bee genetics and breeding programs. He was the first to develop a whole exome sequencing protocol for the honey bee that was used to discover the genome variants associated with the suppressed mite reproduction-trait contributing to the bees’ resilience to the varroa-mite. This varroa-mite is considered the most important biotic stressor of bee colonies and the major cause of colony collapse. Based on this discovery, his team now rolls out the first strategy of marker-assisted selection based on the identified single nucleotide variants. At present prof. de Graaf is coordinator of the Horizon2020 projects B-GOOD and Better-B of the European Commission devoted respectively to healthy and sustainable beekeeping and resilient beekeeping. In 2021, he received an honorary doctorate from University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, Cluj-Napoca, Romania for his contributed to the implementation of advanced technologies in honey bee research.