Commercial beekeepers in the United States will soon have access to a vaccine that could save their hives from it the most devastating disease Honey bees face today.
The drug was developed by the biotech company Dalan animal health to fend off American Foulbrood (AFB), an infectious condition caused by a spore-forming bacterium Paenibacillus larvae.
IThe oral vaccine is incorporated into the feed of the worker bees of a hive and transferred into the “royal jelly” that is fed to the queen.
The exciter has only a well-known host: honey bee larvae. Once it has infected a hive, it is notoriously difficult to eradicate. The only effective way to get rid of the bacteria for good is to set everything on fire: the hive, the tools, and the bees themselves.
Any spores that do not burn can remain viable 70 years or more, ready to infect the next colony that comes their way. Tragically, the bacteria can infect an entire hive in just three weekswhich leaves beekeepers little time to react.
In 2022, Dalan sponsored a placebo controlled study on the safety and efficacy of the vaccine with great results. Not only did the drug protect the workers and queen from dying from AFB disease in tests, it also conferred immunity on the next generation by acting in the king’s ovaries.
The US Department of Agriculture will issue a two-year conditional license for Dalan’s honeybee vaccine, but there’s a good chance the treatment will be extended beyond that period for public use.
Over the next two years, Dalan will distribute a limited amount of the vaccine to beekeepers in the US. If all goes well after that, there is a chance that beekeepers will have direct access to the vaccine.
“This is an exciting step forward for beekeepers as we rely on an antibiotic treatment that has limited effectiveness and requires significant time and energy to apply in our hives,” said Trevor Tauzer, a beekeeper and board member of the California State Beekeepers Association, in a statement.
“If we can prevent infection in our hives, we can avoid costly treatments and focus our energy on other important elements of keeping our bees healthy.”
The global decline in honey bee populations is a serious problem in our modern world. In the US alone, intensive farming techniques, harmful pesticides and climate changeamong other factors resulted in a 90 percent drop in bee populations since 1962, resulting in what looks like a ‘global pollinator crisis‘.
This incredible loss not only puts natural ecosystems in a vulnerable position, but also also risks one-third of the world’s food supply and the staple diet of our own species.
A recently to learn from Harvard University, published last December, found that inadequate pollination reduces global yields of fruits, vegetables and nuts by 3 to 5 percent.
As a result, many people will struggle to access healthy diet options, leading to an estimated 427,000 additional deaths from disease.
Interestingly, in the models used by Harvard researchers, low-income countries would lose significant incomes as crop yields fall, potentially as much as 30 percent of their total agricultural value.
But it was people in middle- and higher-income countries that showed the greatest health effects, likely due to the nature of today’s global food system, where wealthier nations tend to import food.
“This study shows that doing too little to help pollinators harms not only nature but also human health,” says Harvard environmental health scientist Matthew Smith.
A vaccine that protects them could also protect us.
The Pollination Crisis Study was published in Environmental Health Perspectives.
