Patents on the soles of your shoes...: Oh, patents! New vaccine for honeybees!

Thursday, January 26, 2023

Oh, patents! New vaccine for honeybees!

On January 7th, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Center for Veterinary Biologics conditionally approved the first vaccine for honeybees. A vaccine designed to protect bees against a deadly bacterial disease called American FoulBrood (AFB). A disease caused by a gram-positive, spore-forming bacterium, Paenibacillus larvae, that is highly contagious to bees, and known to wipe out entire colonies.

To date the only cure for AFB was burning the infected hives, and all of the associated equipment, since the disease is not treatable. According to Dalan Animal Health, the company that masterminded the honeybee vaccine, an estimated 40% of the 2.8 million commercially operated beehives in the US died, during the year April 2018 to April 2019. Honeybee death with an impact not only on beekeeper jobs, but on farmers, who depend on bees for the pollination of their crops. In the US, bees are estimated to pollinate approximately one-third of all crops. Thus, bee health is crucial to biodiversity, ecosystems, food security, and trade of agricultural products.

A vaccine for bees? Having survived the COVID-19 pandemic largely due to two vaccines, and two boosters, each of which may have given you a really sore arm, and left you in a zombie state for at least 24 hours, you are probably wondering how on earth bees might get vaccinated.

The new honeybee vaccine is an oral formulation. It is incorporated into Royal jelly, the food secreted by nurse bees to feed queen bees and larvae. Upon ingestion, the vaccine is transported to the queen bee’s ovaries, from where all the larvae receive immunity before they hatch. The prophylactic vaccine was developed by Dalan Animal Health, a company in Athens, Georgia, dedicated to the health of honeybees.

This invention is patented. The below-cited two World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) patents recite the first honeybee vaccine, effective against both American FoulBrood (AFB), and European FoulBrood (EFB), caused by the bacterium Melissococcus plutonius. In fact, the scope of the invention even extends to other insects and invertebrates, such as shrimp, grasshoppers, mealworms and other pollinators, where the maternal invertebrate would be vaccinated with a targeted inactive bacterium to confer immunity to her offspring.

WO2022192752A1 - Vaccine method and composition for bacterial diseases in invertebrates.
WO2022051406A1 - Use of vitellogenin for defining and testing novel immunogens in insects.

Below, the sounds of a very busy queen bee, with a healthy court of worker bees.