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Developing vaccines for humans is hard enough; imagine trying to do so for a tiny creature with a totally different kind of immune system. Well, that’s what scientists set out to do for the honeybee.
Let’s start with the obvious: honeybees are a critical part of our food system. Not only do they pollinate a huge percentage of plants that we eat, but they also make honey, which is delicious. Unfortunately, they are also threatened for a lot of reasons ranging from disease to pesticides to just run-of-the-mill climate change.
And there’s one threat in particular that’s a bit of a vintage throwback with a modern solution: the bacteria Pseudomonas larvae is a long-time foe of the honeybees. It causes American Foul Brood (AFB) infection, which can spread quickly through honeybee hives. Interestingly, AFB only affects larval honeybees in their first few days of life. The bacterial spores get fed to the larvae by nurse bees, where they multiply inside the larvae, killing them from the inside out. The dead larvae turn dark brown and the entire hive takes on a nasty smell, giving the infection its name.
The bacterial spores can easily spread throughout the hive, including the honey, as well as between hives and into the surrounding ecosystem as the bees come and go during foraging. These spores can remain viable in the ecosystem for decades, so even if you get rid of all the infected bees, new hives brought to that same area are at risk.
There are a few available ways to treat hives once the infection has been detected. The most effective course of action is burning the hives with the bees inside – and while it definitely gets rid of the bacteria, it isn’t exactly great news for all those bees. A less scorched-earth option is antibiotics, which can be useful for AFB, but in many countries giving livestock antibiotics to prevent disease is illegal due to the growing concerns over antibiotic resistance. So most of the time you can only give your bees antibiotics after the infection is detected – and when you’re dealing with a bacteria like Pseudomonas, that can be too little, too late.
The frustrating part is that this isn’t the first time beekeeping operations have been plagued by AFB. Historically, it was one of the most dreaded honeybee diseases in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. AFB was a massive problem in the United States, costing beekeepers thousands of dollars in livestock loss. Very strict state-level inspections and hive sanitation regulations helped to finally bring infection levels in check in the 1920s.
Unfortunately, after decades of low infection levels, some states relaxed these rules – and that, in combination with an increase in commercial beekeeping nationwide, has led to AFB infections being on the rise again. And regulations in one state can affect bees everywhere, since honeybees are shipped to different locations based on seasonality and need. This means that AFB can be hard to prevent when regulations vary from one state to the next – which is why having a vaccine against AFB is such a great idea.
This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve immunized the animals within our agricultural system. Vaccines are used on lots of commercial livestock, like cows, chickens, and even fish, to protect them against all kinds of infections. We’re so good at immunizing animals that one of only two diseases that we’ve ever eradicated was one found in cattle and their relatives.
But unfortunately, giving vaccines to insects isn’t as simple as it is for other animals, because of how our immune systems differ. Vertebrates have two kinds of immune systems: one is called an adaptive system, which makes antibodies to help attack a pathogen we’ve been exposed to before to try to prevent us from getting sick again; the other is called an innate system, which helps us recognize and respond to new pathogens that we haven’t seen before. Insects, like honeybees, only have an innate immune system, so they can’t make antibodies to fight off infections they’ve been exposed to before – which is why a vaccine against AFB is so hard to make.