About the Authors

Yael Garbian

Contributed equally to this work with: Yael Garbian, Eyal Maori

Affiliation The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Rehovot, Israel

Eyal Maori

Contributed equally to this work with: Yael Garbian, Eyal Maori

Current address: Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Affiliation The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Rehovot, Israel

Haim Kalev

Affiliation The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Rehovot, Israel

Sharoni Shafir

Affiliation The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Rehovot, Israel

Ilan Sela

sela@agri.huji.ac.il

Affiliation The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Rehovot, Israel

Competing Interests

Patent pending: The authors assigned their rights to Yissum research development company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem LTD, which together with Beeologics LLC submitted a patent application entitled “Compositions for controlling Varroa mites in bees” (Serial No. 61/251,339) on October 14, 2009. IS was the Chief Scientist of Beeologics. EM was an employee and consultant of Beeologics. This does not alter our adherence to all PLoS Pathogens policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: IS SS EM YG. Performed the experiments: YG EM HK. Analyzed the data: IS SS YG EM. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: IS SS. Wrote the paper: YG EM SS IS.