Vaccine for Bees

[Phoebe]

A new vaccine for bees has been approved in the US. It's interesting because although it's not clear this illness is the main reason numbers of bees have been collapsing It certainly won't hurt to prevent it and it could be a model for other vaccines if they succeed. But as with all vaccines you do wonder how it might affect the bees and whether the government can be trusted to apply a proper standard to a case like this involving insects. Hopefully? The whole thing is very interesting to me.

[poorpete]

Wow

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... t-approved

Seems we already give Bees antibiotics once they get the disease, so we're already doing the hard work.

If it means protection of our food supply and happy bees, I'm all for it!

At first I thought this was a vaccine for bee stings, I'd be excited about that too.

[Mando]

we lost 2 hives this year. one due to wax moths overwhelming a hive after it swarmed and the other was weakened by European hornets that carried away bees and killed them quicker than they could reproduce leaving that hive weak only to have the native bees find the hive and rob it, killing all the bees in the process. I am responsible for this last failure due to outside-the- hive supplemental feeding which brought in the other bees.

Life is hard for bees. We give meds to cattle, dogs, horse, etc so I welcome so help although most of our problems are external predators and parasitic larvae and rarely disease.

I assume the vaccine is for the queen only so her eggs will have better immunity.