Exciting News from Washington! A groundbreaking insect vaccine has been developed to boost the health of honeybees. The innovative vaccine, created by researchers at Dalan in Athens, Ga., targets American foulbrood, a deadly disease caused by a spore-forming bacterium known as Paenibacillus larvae. While adult bees are not affected by the disease, they can spread spores within the hive, leading to the infection and death of larvae. With spores remaining viable for over 50 years, beekeepers have had to resort to extreme measures like irradiation or burning of infected hives. This new vaccine offers hope for saving bee populations and the livelihoods of beekeepers.
Aside from foulbrood disease, bees face a myriad of challenges such as pesticides, parasites, climate change, and nutritional stress, all of which increase their susceptibility to infectious diseases. In the span of a year, U.S. beekeepers lost nearly half of their colonies, highlighting the urgent need for solutions like this vaccine.
The vaccine developed by Dalan does not involve traditional syringes. Instead, bees are inoculated through a sugar paste infused with heat-killed P. larvae. Worker bees consume the paste and pass it on through royal jelly to the queen. Within the queen’s gut, the vaccine fragments attach to a protein that transports them to the ovaries, where they can protect future generations of bees from foulbrood disease.
2024-04-24 07:30:00
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