We, the authors of the article discussed by van Alpen and Fernhout, have supplied a response to the critique of our original published article titled "Rapid parallel evolution overcomes global honey bee parasite".

Overall, the refutation by van Alphen and Fernhout ignores several arguments made by our paper and by our cited sources and includes numerous inconsistencies and assumptions in their effort to force-fit VSH into our interpretations. Uncapping, removal and/or re-capping is all part of the spectrum of behaviours that are included in VSH. We considered VSH as an explanation but the removal aspect did not fit with our data and therefore, we stand by our conclusions that cell-recapping is a viable, functional mite-surviving trait, rather than an incomplete VSH process. There is not yet any evidence that indicates VSH is present in all of the mite-surviving populations used in this study and therefore there is no support for the claim by van Alphen and Fernhout of small shifts in VSH gene frequency explaining the observed patterns we detected in our study. Nevertheless, we see that there is plenty of opportunity for designing a new round of experiments to further explore these traits.