COLUMBUS, Ohio — Honeybees face a variety of threats: climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pesticides, and pathogens, but help is on the way for at least one of those threats in the form of a first-of-its-kind vaccine.

What You Need To Know

  • The United States Department of Agriculture granted a conditional license to Dalan Animal Health for the use of a honeybees vaccine

  • The vaccine: Paenibacillus Larvae Bacterin aims to protect honeybees from American Foulbrood disease 

  • One Ohio college professor said he is optimistic about the vaccine's potential

Reed Johnson is an associate professor in the Department of Entomology at The Ohio State University.

"I think honeybees are amazing animals and they do two things for us, really. They make honey, which of course, everyone loves to eat. I love to have honey on my with my breakfast, but they also provide pollination," Johnson said.

One threat that honeybees face is American Foulbrood disease.

"I mean, insects have all the same kind of diseases that everything else does. They're not they have viruses and bacterial diseases and they everybody gets sick," he said. "The American Foulbrood is a bacteria, and it forms these spores that can be transmitted it from colony to colony through honey. And it affects the larvae, in particular the developing bees that are living inside the colony. And it kills them."

The USDA recently granted Dalan Animal Health a conditional license, which allows the company to use a vaccine it developed to fight the disease.

 
"This vaccine is a real breakthrough because this is they can take some of these American Foulbrood bacteria and break them up and feed them to a honeybee queen. And the honeybee queen is the mother of all those bees that are in the colony. She can lay thousands of eggs per day," Johnson said. "And those eggs will be protected from developing American Foulbrood throughout the entire colony."