World's first vaccine for honeybees approved

The US Department of Agriculture has approved the world's first insect vaccine, developed to protect honeybees from a devastating bacterial disease known to decimate entire hives.

The vaccine created by Dalan Animal Health, a US biotech company, is designed to help protect honeybees from American foulbrood disease, caused by a bacterium that can weaken and kill hives. There is currently no cure for the disease, which in parts of the US has been found in a quarter of hives, requiring beekeepers to destroy and burn any infected colonies and administer antibiotics to prevent further spread.

“It reduces the larvae to this brown goo that has a rancid stink to it,” said Keith Delaplane, an entomologist at the University of Georgia.

The vaccine works by incorporating some of the bacteria into royal jelly fed by worker bees to the queen. The developing bee larvae then have immunity to foulbrood as they hatch.

American foulbrood originated in the US, and has spread around the world. 

As they have been commercialized, transported and pressed into agricultural service, honeybees have been exposed to a cocktail of different diseases that typically lay waste to large numbers of colonies and require major interventions by beekeepers to keep numbers up.

The US is unusually dependent upon managed honeybee colonies to prop up its food pollination, with hives routinely trucked across the country to propagate everything from almonds to blueberries.

This is because many wild bee species are in alarming decline, due to habitat loss and pesticide use, fueling concerns around a global crisis in insect numbers that threatens human food security and health.

Honeybees play an essential part in about one-third of the fruit and produce Americans eat.



Paul Snellen, master beekeeper of the Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association, pulls one of the boards covered with bees. Beekeepers in the U.S. lost an estimated 45% of their managed honeybee colonies in 2021. (Rick Kintzel/The Morning Call via AP)