Honeybee Keepers Will Now Vaccinate Their Bees Against Disease
The deadly American Fullbrood disease is increasingly ravaging honeybee populations, but now a new vaccine is giving beekeepers a better shot at protecting their hives.
When people ask the question what makes the world go around you will get a bunch of different answers like money, happiness, centripetal force, or your personal all-mighty power. One of the most often overlooked reasons why the human race can exist on planet Earth is in large part due to the work of the honeybees. That is why this medical breakthrough that allows beekeepers the ability to vaccinate their hives from American Foulbrood is a crucial advancement in science that helps humans ability to thrive on planet Earth.
American Foulbrood is a widespread global disease that is also known as Paenibacillus larvae and is considered incurable when a honeybee is infected with it. Up until now the only option a beekeeper has had when they identify that one of their hives has become infected with this disease was to burn the entire hive and incinerate all the potentially infected bees to stem the spread of the disease to their remaining hives. They also would need to burn any of their equipment that potentially could be infected with the antibiotic-resistant American Foulbrood.
According to CNET, “Certain antibiotics can also be used to help combat the disease, but those antibiotics can’t fully solve the problem.” That is why the drastic incineration method is widely used worldwide, and some US states have a mandatory burn-only policy that beekeepers need to adhere to. It is no secret that the bee’s food-gathering activity is a major piece of plant life on our planet’s pollination processes.
The extinction of honeybees would be catastrophic for human existence because the pollination process is vital to the global food supply chain which humans rely on. On January 4th the US Department of Agriculture approved a vaccine developed by the biotech company Dalan Animal Health out of Georgia, and it targets American Foulbrood in bees. The vaccine will be manufactured by Diamond Animal Health corporation, and it is expected to completely eradicate this disease in the bee population which is a big win for the human race.
CNET reported a statement from Trevor Tauzer who is a board member of California’s State Beekeepers Association as saying, “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,” To be able to administer the novel vaccine to their hives all beekeepers need to do is to mix it in with the feed they provide to the worker bees. The worker bees will then feed that to the queen of the hive, and upon her ingestion of the vaccine it will travel to her ovaries, and this ensures that all the queen’s larvae are then immune to American Foulbrood.
This scientific breakthrough is not only important for this disease, but it has provided vaccine developers with a blueprint of the format that is needed to target vaccines for other diseases that honeybees face. The honeybee’s survival is critical to our existence on Earth and with global population growth and our ever-changing climate having a solution to the potential catastrophic extinction of the honeybees resolved is a big step forward for mankind.
