Vaccinate your … BEES?!!!!!?!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Bees are essential to our food supply and planet. However, our buzzing little friends can get sick just like us. Some diseases can wipe out an entire hive! How can we save them?
Fear not, Franziska Dickel and a team from Karl-Franzens University flew to the rescue!
They developed a vaccine for bees! The researchers compared THIRTY-FIVE vaccinated hives, to TWENTY-FIVE control hives. Each hive has around SIXTY to EIGHTY THOUSAND bees! So how do you vaccinate all those bees? A tiny syringe? Nope! They placed the vaccine in their food.
Results? The vaccinated bees showed up to a FIFTY percent increase in resistance to disease. When administered to an already infected colony, surviva-BEE-lity improved too! Protection was passed from the queen to offspring. That’s the BEES-knees!
Saving the bees could BEE as simple as a vaccine!
So cool I can hardly BEE-lieve it! *BZZZT*
Reference:
Dickel F, Bos NMP, Hughes H, Martín-Hernández R, Higes M, Kleiser A and Freitak D (2022) The oral vaccination with Paenibacillus larvae bacterin can decrease susceptibility to American Foulbrood infection in honey bees—A safety and efficacy study. Front. Vet. Sci. 9:946237. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2022.946237