Like many other scourges that flourished hand in hand with lucrative trades, the Varroa took advantage of the commerce in bees, now just another commodity, to legally cross borders. This leech passed through customs astride domesticated European bees, the Apis mellifera, which were imported into the country en masse because they were more docile and better producers than the North African intermissa, their bad-tempered local cousins, who had never encountered the parasite.
