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| Photo: Kevin/Adobe Stock |
Don’t roll your eyes because I know you want to know how they put a needle into every bee arm! The United States Department of Agriculture just approved a vaccine that aims to curb foulbrood, a serious disease caused by the bacterium Paenibacillus larvae that can weaken and kill hives. There is currently no cure for the disease, which in parts of the US has been found in a quarter of hives, requiring beekeepers to destroy and burn any infected colonies and administer antibiotics to prevent further spread.
"This is an exciting step forward for beekeepers, as we
rely on antibiotic treatment that has limited effectiveness and requires lots
of time and energy to apply to our hives," Tauzer Apiaries, a board member
of the California State Beekeepers Association, said in a news release from
Dalan Animal Health (working with University of Georgia Department of
Agriculture.) "If we can prevent an infection in our hives, we can avoid
costly treatments and focus our energy on other important elements of keeping
our bees healthy."
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| Photo: Keith Deleplane |
So how does it get into the bees?
The disease is caused by Paenibacillus larvae, a type of
bacteria that affects the bee's larvae. The vaccine contains some of that
bacteria, and it will be mixed in with the royal jelly, which worker bees
secrete from their heads and then feed to the queen and larvae. When the queen
eats the jelly, she will ingest fragments of the vaccine that will grant her
offspring some immunity against the bacteria.
Inherited immunity, according to Keith Delaplane, (professor
in the CAES Department of Entomology and director of the UGA Bee Program) involves
the queen incorporating fragments of bacterial cells into her eggs. The egg
contains the antigen, which in turn creates and promotes an immune response.
The current project calls for feeding queen bees Dalan’s proprietary vaccine
after which the inoculated queen, for the remainder of her lifetime, will
produce worker bees that are primed to be immune against that pathogen. “In a
perfect scenario, the queens could be fed a cocktail within a queen candy — the
soft, pasty sugar that queen bees eat while in transit,” Delaplane said. “Queen
breeders could advertise ‘fully vaccinated queens.’”
There is also some evidence that immunized worker bees could
pass immunity to their sisters. As they age, Delaplane said, bees go through a
series of predictable tasks — cleaning cells, feeding larvae, processing honey,
foraging and guarding the nest. If an immunized nurse bee feeds her larval
sisters, it could give them immunity. He likened the relationship to the
mother-baby relationship of lactating mammals where immune benefits are
transferred through breastmilk.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/04/honeybee-vaccine-first-approved
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/06/1147342961/honeybee-population-vaccine
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/07/us/honeybee-vaccine-usda-approval-scn-trnd/index.html
https://newswire.caes.uga.edu/story/10067/honey-bee-vaccine.html