Vaccination can save bees: Bee population in Danger

Like humans, bees introduce their offspring to pathogens in small concentrations so their immune system can develop a resistance to it. But the bees’ delivery system is quite different. Now nearly 10 years later, I feel like I’ve solved an important part of the puzzle. Because of this process, baby bee enters the world vaccinated.

The phenomenon of dwindling bee populations continue to bother scientists because of the effect of this event on ecosystems and agricultural farms where the bees pollinate plants and increase crop yields.

Since 1947, the number of managed honeybee colonies has fallen from six million to just around 2.5 million. Incidentally, it includes bacteria that the worker bees picked up in the outside environment, as a release noted. What we found is that it’s as simple as eating.

Queen bees only rarely leave their nests, so other members of the colony must bring her food, known as royal jelly. While that may sound like a modernist play, researchers discovered it after years of bee study.

After consumption, the pathogens travel to the queen’s gut, without affecting her. Through the gut, the pathogens transfer to her body cavity and arrive at the queen’s “fat body”, which is equivalent to the human liver.

Co-author Dalial Freitak, a postdoctoral researcher with University of Helsinki adds: “I have been working on bee immune priming since the start of my doctoral studies”. There are a handful of afflictions devastating bee colonies, such as American Foul Brood, the deformed wing virus and the nosema fungi.

Now that scientists understand this mechanism for natural bee immunity, researchers say there’s hope to come up with edible vaccines to help the insect out.

According to a 2014 report by the U.S. government, pollinators are instrumental for a healthy economy and critical to food security, contributing 35 percent of global food production. Insect vaccines could play an important role in helping to combat colony collapse disorder, in addition to fighting a variety of diseases. Study’s author Gro Amdam from Arizona State University, said, “Because this vaccination process is naturally occurring, this process would be cheap and ultimately simple to implement”.

They also suggest that the discovery could extend to other species throughout the animal kingdom.

Vitellogenin is something that bees and other egg-laying animals such as fish and poultry have. As a result, they are inadvertently vaccinated by food vaccination. “It has the potential to both improve and secure food production for humans”.

ASU School of Life Sciences is an academic unit of ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.