A new vaccine for honeybees. Let's talk about
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The world of bees I'm Humberto Boncristiani if you new to the channel, we were all about bees here
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Researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland announced last week the first edible vaccine for honeybees.
The product called PrimeBee is gonna hit the market pretty soon and it looks like it's already preparing everything for it
they have a website and because of that the media got crazy about it and there was a lot of
Speculations and I decide that this might be a good thing to talk about it today
As far as I understood the way it works is like that the queen bee is gonna receive some kind of feeding
Material, this feeding. Material is gonna trigger a specific immunity
Against American foul brood and this specific immunity is going to be transferred to the next generation of bees
spreading all over the colony. In the insect world in the past scientists believe that
Insects only rely on innate immune system and they didn't have any specific immune system against pathogens
But apparently this have changed in the last ten years or so. There are plenty of evidences out there showing that
Insects have some kind of a specific immune system and not only that, they're able to transfer that
specific immune system to the next generation of insects.
So the concept is not new. it's called trans-generational immune priming and is described in insect many years ago
but the first article that demonstrate that in honeybees come in
2014 and it's from the dr. Javier Hernandez Lopez
so but in this article of
2014 they have a proof of concept
however, they didn't show any, they didn't have any idea about the mechanisms behind that
specific immunity is transferred to the next generation of bees
So one year later in 2015 the same group that just announced the vaccine
Published something very interesting. I'm gonna leave a link in the description below so you can check that out
what the researchers from Finland find out and that article is that
Honey bees are able to get fragments
and through the mid gut
put the fragments of American foulbrood in the hemocells in the hemolymph of the honeybees and these fragments of
American foulbrood end up connected with the very important protein of honeybee called Vitellogenin
in the fat bodies and not only that.
they go a little further and find the same fragments of American foulbrood into the eggs of
that Queen it's probably the beginning of our understanding of how
Trans-generational immune priming works in honeybees
However in the same article, they didn't show any proof of concept showing
protection showing that those eggs they have those fragments have the potential to
defend themselves better in the presence of American foulbrood.
So I did a little digging and I found the patent the claim of the pattern is to protect the idea of a vaccine for
insects, they try to cover all
Insects, not only honeybees. They show a list of possible pathogens
they are working on it and that covered a lot of different pathogens from
Honeybees most of them bacteria and fungi and no mention about viruses
And so I found what I was looking for I was looking for
some data showing protection showing that the vaccine works and
And the way they did experiment was very simple. They used the vaccine
They develop into groups of Queens one group of Queens - they give the vaccine and the other group of Queens
They didn't give the vaccine and they wait for those Queens to lay eggs
They they graft those eggs and wait for for them to hatch
Collect the larvae bring that larvae to the laboratory and then and the specific time of their development. They
Challenge those larvae with the different amount of American foulbrood with different amount of spores
And then they compare the mortality of those larvae over time
Very well-designed experiment and the results were even more interesting
The results are very straightforward when they use the concentration of five spores per larvae
They were able to get a protection rate of 90 percent survivorship. That's a high number
That's very very promising
however, when they increase the amount of Spore at the amount of exposure to American foulbrood
to 20 spores per larvae there was a there was only a protection rate of 50 percent. So there was a reduction there
meaning that if increase the amount of spores
May be the protection that was passed to the next generation is not that strong
So putting all of this together I was thinking about this whole
Vaccine thing and my thoughts on that are
are this
I'm celebrating. I'm
Excited because I could see advancement in the science of honeybees. There is a huge potential in this vaccine and
However, I have a little concern the proof of concept for the vaccine that is
written in this patent in my opinion in my experience with American foulbrood do not
Make me comfortable. in real-life situations. We know that
American foulbrood are able to produce in for example in one single larvae that got infected
You can get 1 billion spores. There is a billion with capital B. It's a lot of spores
So it's not it's not difficult to do a simple math and understand that in real life
situation bees might be exposed to
a much higher
concentration of spores, around thousands of spores for bee or larvae in that case and
The vaccine were able to show
protection with very small amount of spores to increase the amounts for the spores the
Protection goes down and that's my concern here in a real-life situation. I'm I'll be thinking myself
Is this vaccines gonna work in a real-life situation?
And I cannot i'm not comfortable to say yes
But what I can say is that because the patent was filed
A while ago around two or three years ago
My hope is that they have improved the capacity of this
Vaccine and gonna bring something to the market that really can help the beekeepers
So for the developers of the vaccines
Congratulations, that's very good news
I hope for you guys the best. I'm very excited to see this in the market and to test it myself
Let me know if I can do anything. I would love to collaborate
let me know if I can put my hands in one of those I
would love to do our
Independent tasks here in the state of Florida to show to the commercial beekeepers here that the results that we're gonna get
So that's it for today. I hope you guys enjoy learn something new
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