A vaccine to protect bees. Another part of the scientific revolution

Bees are one of the symbolic animals in the fight for the preservation of the environmentused as they are in communication campaigns against pesticides to symbolize the damage that pesticides and herbicides can cause to the environment and therefore to ourselves.

Here I am not interested in discussing the numerous anti-scientific aspects of this communication, which has no qualms about inventing lies or exaggerating certain aspects to promote the noble goals it sets for itself; I am interested instead in showing the reader what is being done to preserve the health of honey bees from one of the worst hive parasitesa bacterium that causes the so-called American foulbrood.

This disease, caused by Paenibacillus spores, is highly infectious and destructive, affecting the larvae of honey bee colonies. As soon as they hatch, they are inadvertently fed with bacterial spores, which germinate and replicate in the midgut causing septicaemia and producing over 1 billion new spores for each infected larva. As the dead larvae are removed from their cells by the worker bees, the spores are disseminated throughout the hive products, including honey and wax, as well as in the frames and the box that encloses it. The spores are resistant to environmental conditions and chemical treatments and have been reported to maintain infectivity for up to fifty years.

Faced with such a harmful and contagious infectious disease, it is natural to think of a vaccine; however, one must know that the immune system of bees and other insects does not have antibodiesand therefore until a decade ago it was believed that it was only able to mount a response of a natural type, that is, not specifically “trainable” to recognize a certain pathogenic agent.

In fact, an important phenomenon has been discovered in the last ten years: the pathogens eaten by the queen end up providing immunity to the eggs, because the antigens it has processed, carried by the vitellogenin, are used to train the larvae’s immune system in a specific way. It is not yet known which component of the insect immune system is “educated” by the antigens carried in the eggs; however, it was found experimentally that larvae hatching from eggs laid by queens treated with specific antigens were then relatively protected in encountering the pathogens from which those antigens originated.

At this point, it was thought to feed the queens with inactivated spores of the bacterium that causes American foulbrood, supplying them with royal jelly suitably added with this preparation, and it was found that the larvae deriving from the treated queens were resistant to the pathogen when they were exposed.

Bearing in mind that antibiotics are ineffective against the American foulbrood agent, and given that instead not only the vaccine was effective but also non-toxic, we rapidly proceeded with the industrial development of a preparation useful for inducing immunity in the larvae through feeding queens, thanks to a collaboration between the University of Georgia and a small dedicated company.

It is an absolute first: for the first time, that is, an effective product has been obtained for stimulating an immune defense based on a completely different system from oursand partly unknown, demonstrating in one fell swoop the robustness of basic research which contradicted an assumption taken for granted, based on the prejudice generated by the absence of antibodies in insects, but also opening a way for the production of subsequent vaccines in hopefully able both to better defend the hives and to decrease the use of drugs to treat the animals.

Here is a new, splendid example of how basic research to answer questions of apparently little interest to man – in this case how insects defend themselves from pathogens – can lead to considerable progress, with an advantage for everyone – even for the cute little pollinators at the center of environmental campaigns.

A vaccine for them too against the plague that afflicts them: this is the gift that scientific research, in collaboration with a private company and regulatory agencies, has brought to all of us and to beekeepers in particular.

And let’s hope that among the latter there are no lovers of the crazy ideas about autism, experimental serums, nanoparticles, cancers and other nonsense that we hear circulating about vaccines for human use.