When you understand how the first-ever honeybee vaccine works I'm sure your appreciation for
honeybees will boost even more. Nature has special ways to care for the young, it is beautiful
I was very interested from the very beginning in the science behind the new vaccine for honeybees,
well who wasn't? The first vaccine for insects ever created, that's by itself it's so
cool I made a video about them in 2020 where I talked about the immune system
of honeybees but I didn't cover specifically how the vaccine might work. In the same way, vaccines
revolutionized both human and veterinary medicine, vaccines will also change the beekeeping industry.
The honeybee colony, the social organism, has so many similarities with mammals. For example, did
you know that royal jelly is the analog of milk in mammals? yes, crazy right! The superorganism
produces special food for the newborns just like mammals. Another example is thermoregulation,
did you know that honeybees are able to control their temperature like mammals? There are plenty
of other examples but I'm going to leave them for another video. The superorganism has so
many similarities with mammals that it was clear that the colony must also have a way to immunize
itself from previous infections and transfer that immunity to the next generation of bees, otherwise
they wouldn't have a chance in nature. The ability to transfer immunity from one generation of
insects to the next is called transgenerational immune-priming and researchers knew honeybees were
able to do it for a while. The first demonstration of transgenerational immune priming in honeybees
was recorded in 2014 by Dr. Javier Hernandez Lopez in a publication in the proceedings of
the royal society B, where he demonstrated that the injection of American Foulbrood bacteria
and E.coli into the hemolymph of honeybee queens make the next generation of bees less susceptible
to the infection by these pathogens, in this publication it was clear that infected honeybee
colonies were less susceptible to the disease in generations ahead, two problems though one
the authors use injections in the honeybee queens which makes the method very difficult to be used
in real-life situations, the second problem was that nobody knew how the immune transfer occurs.
The researchers didn't know the molecular basis of the process. It was one year later in 2015
when Dr. Haley Salmella working in collaboration with Dr. Dalial Freitak in Finland publishing a
scientific article describing the preliminary molecular model on how occurs in honeybees it
turns out that Vitellogenin is the carrier of immune elicitors to the next generation
of honeybees Vitellogenin is the main component of the fat bodies of honeybees and an important
multi-functional tissue used as well in the honeybee eggs, in another word, once a honeybee
colony gets a bacterial infection somehow pieces of these bacteria attach to the Viteloogenin and
end up in the fat bodies of the honeybee queen and even more interesting these pieces of bacteria
are somehow transported to the ovaries of the honeybee queen. Isn't that amazing? The best part
is that the whole vaccination process can be done orally allowing Dalan Animal Health to use the
natural biological defenses already in honeybees to develop the first-ever honeybee vaccine.
In the new vaccine a concentration of dead bacteria is mixed with the candy
given to honeybee queens in honeybee operations to simulate the process mentioned earlier whoa whoa
wait a minute humberto how do these pieces of bacteria get into the queen if she doesn't feed
herself? I know a bit of honeybee biology and if I remember correctly honeybee queens rarely
feed themselves in the colony and they are also better protected against diseases? Well,
I'm glad you asked! Here is where this story gets even more fascinating, yes honeybee queens are fed
by honeybee workers most of the time which begs the question, how the queen will get the immunity
to pass it to the next generation of bees without being sick herself or consuming the candy with
the vaccine? To understand that we need to look at the natural infection of honeybee colonies.
Sick honeybee queens won't have the strength to lay healthy eggs. If the honeybee queen needs to
get sick to pass the immunity that would be too risky for the colony because the honeybee queen
can die in the process. So how does evolution takes care of that? Evolution has shaped a system
where the queen doesn't need to be infected to transmit immunity to the young larvae. The key
to the process is the worker bees. The worker bees are the ones dealing with sick brood all the time
making sure diseases don't spread throughout the whole colony a process called hygienic behavior.
Worker honeybees developed the ability to process bacterial material into small pieces that travel
from the gut to the hypopharyngeal glands to produce royal jelly containing these little
pieces of bacteria. The worker bees then shared a special food with the queen eliminating the
risk to make the queen sick and at the same time giving the queen the ability to transmit these
pieces of bacteria to the young generation protecting them from potential infection.
The same process applies to the vaccine. When Dalan Animal Health finishes the food
development of the vaccine, the beekeeper will receive a solution of concentrated bacteria
to be mixed with the sugar candy normally given to honeybee queens in beekeeping operations.
The honeybee workers then consume the candy and feed the honeybee queen with the necessary
information to be transmitted to the next generation of bees through the eggs. Now you
understand how nature takes care of bees and how the Dalan Animal Health vaccine works. The immune
system of honeybees is revealing itself to be much more complex than we could imagine in the past. If
you want to have an overview of the immune system of honeybees please watch this video right here