A vaccine for bees has an unexpected effect

Honeybee hives vaccinated against a bacterial disease had much lower levels of an unrelated viral disease than did unvaccinated hives, veterinarian Nigel Swift of Dalan Animal Health reported April 3 at theResearchers at Dalan, based in Athens, Ga., designed the bee vaccine to protect against American foulbrood — a fatal disease caused by a spore-forming bacterium called. Adult bees don’t get sick but can spread spores in the hive, where the disease infects and kills larvae.

Dalan’s vaccine against foulbrood disease doesn’t rely on tiny syringes. Instead, bees are inoculated through a sugar paste that researchers spike with heat-killed. Worker bees eat the candy and incorporate it into their royal jelly, which they feed to the queen. Inside the queen’s gut, bits of the bacteria attach to a protein, which in turn transports the vaccine fragments to the ovaries where they can be deposited in eggs. Larvae that hatch from the eggs should be protected from the disease.

Based on that evidence, the U.S. Department of Agriculture gave conditional approval for the bee vaccine, Dalan announced in 2023. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency authorized use of the vaccine later that year. In one sense, the test was a bust. No cases of foulbrood disease were found in any of the hives. “This apiary was just too good” at controlling the disease, Swift said. So the company couldn’t determine how effective the vaccine was against its intended target.). Both vaccinated and unvaccinated hives started the study with the same number of mites and a baseline level of virus, as measured by a PCR test.

Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)

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