All New AFB Vaccine with Dalan Animal Health (S6, E51)

S6, E51 - All New AFB Vaccine with Dalan Animal Health

Neil: Good day and greetings from Australia. My name is Neil and I'm living in Jervis Bay, New South Wales. We're about 300 kilometers south of Sydney and about to be impacted by our first wave of varroa. I've got lots and lots of questions and I'm connecting to the hive mind for solutions, suggestions, and ideas. Welcome to  Beekeeping Today  Podcast.

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Jeff Ott: Welcome to  Beekeeping Today  Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman. Today's episode is brought to you by the bee nutrition superheroes at Global Patties. Family-operated and buzzing with passion global patties, crafts, protein-packed patties that'll turn your hives into powerhouse production. Picture these strong colonies, booming brood, and honey flowing like a sweet river. It's super protein for your bees and they love it, check out their buffet of patties, tailor-made for your bees in your specific area. Head over to www.global patties.com and give your bees the nutrition they deserve.

Global Patties: Today's episode is brought to you by the bee nutrition superheroes at Global Patties. Family-operated and buzzing with passion global patties, crafts, protein-packed patties that'll turn your hives into powerhouse production. Picture these strong colonies, booming brood, and honey flowing like a sweet river. It's super protein for your bees and they love it, check out their buffet of patties, tailor-made for your bees in your specific area. Head over to www.global patties.com and give your bees the nutrition they deserve.

Jeff: Hey, quick shout out to all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for download and listen to over 250 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com. Hey, thanks a lot, Neil in New South Wales, Australia, that's a fabulous opening. It's great to have an opening from down under, Becky.

Becky: Oh my gosh, we couldn't make that stuff up. That was just great, right?

Jeff: It really is. Neil, I hope you've appreciated all the shows we've had this spring and into the summer about varroa. I hope they help you out and keep listening. We still have a lot of shows to come.

Becky: I think that it really just reinforces the fact that all of our focus on varroa, it is really needed, not just in the United States but across the world. We have a pretty deep library of episodes that will help him and hopefully other people.

Jeff: Yes, I just wrote a short piece and it's talking about all beekeeping is local, but we have to think globally and I think that is really true and Neil is a good example of that. Varroa is managed locally, but you have to think globally. Thanks a lot, Neil. If any of you sitting out there say, "Hey, I can do opening for  Beekeeping Today Podcast," you know you can and we would really enjoy an opening from you.

Becky: Absolutely.

Jeff: It's pretty easy to do. All you do is use your mobile device, your cell phone and record a voicemail just saying whatever your opening is, say who you are, where you are. End it saying, "And welcome to  Beekeeping Today Podcast."

Becky: It does help if you have that amazing Australian accent, but that's not required. We're loving these accents.

Jeff: Becky, I'm sensing a theme you really like, I can't remember his name. His name from South Africa, his accent, the Northern Irish accent.

Becky: Irish, yes.

Jeff: Are you tired of the Midwest accent?

Becky: It's just so exciting to hear people talk about beekeeping with an accent. I don't know.

Jeff: [laughs] Act locally, think globally. Speaking of which-- have you ever experienced American foulbrood in any of your colonies, any of your yards

Becky: I have not experienced it in my colonies, but it is a serious, serious disease that we all need to be prepared to deal with. We can only hope that it doesn't cross our apiary borders.

Jeff: Yes. It used to be the scourge of beekeeping if you got American foulbrood, and that's the start of the inspection program. A couple of weeks ago we had the Apiary Inspectors of America. If you go back to the annals of their history, I'm sure you would find that the American foulbrood was at that base and it was a serious problem for beekeepers. If you had it in one yard, you'd have to theoretically destroy the entire yard because you just didn't know how far those spores had transferred.

Becky: I've heard recently some nightmare stories where beekeepers didn't know they had it, and so they probably lived with it for a couple of years. By the time it was actually correctly diagnosed, it was very devastating, not just to their operations, but also potentially to operations that it was spread to.

Jeff: Yes, if you don't know that it's there, you could attribute the loss to varroa mite today and say, "Oh, well this died out because of varroa." Put more bees in it, and you just continue to perpetuate the problem. I had American foulbrood in one colony or was it in two colonies, two colonies in Colorado that was evident. I ended up having to dig a big hole in the ground and burn those colonies. It was really sad. Very painful.

Becky: Right, right. It's one of the parts of animal care that is not fun to do to be able to mitigate that disease. It's just there are a couple of different resources. You can do a shook swarm or in some places you have no choice, but you have to burn. Regardless, it is something that as a beekeeper, you just never want to deal with.

Jeff: Luckily today our guests from Dalan Animal Health are here to talk about their vaccine that they've developed for American Foulbrood. A couple of months ago, we had Keith Delaplane on and he talked about how the University of Georgia assisted in the development of the American Foulbrood vaccine. Now we're here talking with Dalan and Animal Health with Annette and Tim to discuss more about the vaccine as it becomes available for beekeepers.

Becky: I am really looking forward to this conversation because I am impressed with this tool, not just as a way to protect bees, but I'm very, very much looking forward to what the future of this vaccine or a vaccine for other pathogens will do for beekeeping. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Jeff: It's a new vaccine using a new approach for vaccine for insects basically and what it holds for the future for other, say, deformed wing virus or something is wonderful. I'm looking forward to talking with Annette and Tim right after these words from our sponsors. We'll be right back.

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbial site, make sure you click on and subscribe to  The Hive, the regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting across the virtual  Beekeeping Today Podcast table are Annette Kleiser and Tim Ferris. Annette is from Dalan. Tim is a beekeeper working with Dalan. Welcome, folks, to the podcast.

Tim Ferris: Morning, Jeff. Morning, everyone.

Annette Kleiser: Hello, Jeff. Good to see you. Hi, Tim.

Becky: We're so happy to have both of you here. Thank you.

Jeff: We are excited. We've been looking forward to this conversation since our discussion a little over a year ago with Dr. Keith Delaplane from the University of Georgia talking about the American Foulbrood vaccine that he was helping with the field trials. Let's talk about that today. Annette, we'll start with you, tell us a little bit about yourself, and then we'll start talking about the vaccine research and everything you're doing with Dalan.

Annette: I'm the CEO of Dalan Animal Health. I started the company about five years ago, a little bit more than five years ago. I'm a scientist by training, but biologist, but that's many years ago. For the past 25 years, maybe, I've worked with researchers to help them develop products that they thought of in universities and great ideas, universities are full of ideas. I decided to dedicate my life to help create companies and to help make products and make these dreams, these ideas come true. I was born and raised in Germany. I came to this country to do my postdoc after I got my PhD a long time ago in the late '90s.

First, came to Seattle, then moved to Los Angeles and now based in Athens, Georgia, where the headquarter of the company is. I love Georgia. I love Athens. Great place.

Jeff: You did start up in the Seattle area. I'm in Olympia, just south of Seattle. It's also a nice area.

Annette: Yes, very beautiful. I thought I would never leave.

[laughter]

Jeff: Funny how that works. Tim, we'll just jump over to you real quick. Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, and then we'll come back to you when we talk about the field trials.

Tim: I was born and raised in New Zealand. I emigrated to the US when I was 24, when I met my wife, and have been happily married for about 17 years now. I actually got into beekeeping in the US to pollinate pumpkins, which my in-laws grow on one of the largest 'pick-your-own' pumpkin operation here in the state of Pennsylvania. At the same time, I had exposure to honeybees my entire life growing up with kiwifruit industry in New Zealand where we had the fourth-largest packing and cold storage facility in the country.

I think when I was 10, I actually took honeybees to school for pet day. I had Lego a container where no one opened it, but it was bees that I picked up off some flowers and put them inside. I've always been curious about honeybees. Over the last 17 years, we've grown our apiary operation to be around 500 colonies. From a boutique installation, commercially, we produce everything from freeze-dried raw jelly to bee venom. We do a lot of research programs with different universities, and we produce up to about 30,000 pounds of honey a year. Most of it, we sell direct retail, and then we have about 25 retail partners.

Jeff: Thanks, Tim. Annette, can you share with us your journey with Dalan Animal Health from its inception to where it stands today?

Annette: It was a complete accident. I think a lot of those things happen by complete accident. You can't plan them. I was brought in by the University of Helsinki to look at their portfolio of innovations and ideas in life science. Very broadly, a lot of ideas for new tools for detecting diabetes, blood sugar levels, different drug ideas for cancer or Alzheimer's. It was January, I flew to Helsinki, and it was very cold, I just have to say here. Nothing to do with anything. It was really cold and very, very dark. Beautiful city, but it was my first time. By complete accident, I was in the office of reviewing technologies.

I got to meet the researcher, Dalial Freitak, who happened to be in the office, passing through to sign some paperwork. The director pulled her in and said, "Dalial, you need to tell these folks about your idea for honeybee vaccine" Immediately, it just grabbed me. It was so amazing. We all know or have known for decades that honeybees are unaddressed around the world, that colonies are dying for all kinds of reasons, and how incredibly important they are for our survival. Not just for food security, but the role they play in climate, biodiversity. Just incredibly important animals.

We are throwing our hands up in the air and we don't really know what to do. Of course, there are pesticide issues, and of course, there are weather and all kinds of influences that make these beehives or these colonies stresssed. When I started looking into it, I realized that over 50% of the losses are actually due to diseases, that honeybees get sick just like any other animal. Just like we get sick, they get bacterial diseases, viral diseases, fungal diseases, and oftentimes, many multiple diseases at once. Here is a researcher that has an idea to address this. We need to do this. We have to give this a try.

I worked with Dalial over a number of months looking at what would this look like, what would be the roadmap, what would be the business plan, and developing it. At some point, we decided, "Okay, let's do it. Let's jump into this." We formed the company in December 2018 and started working. I was living in Los Angeles at the time. She had just moved her lab to the University of Graz in Austria. We put together a team of experts in animal health and in agriculture and in beekeeping around the world, whoever we could find that we felt had the right expertise, the right thinking to help us.

We were a virtual team, literally spread out across countries, across states, and started to work on it. That was the beginning of Dalan.

Becky: Annette, I think that what we really have to talk about is the fact that if research on a new vaccine for poultry, or beef cattle, or swine had been developed, the path from research to market would have been funded and faster and so much easier. You picked a livestock animal that although is so important worldwide, the beekeeping industry is not wealthy. It's a struggle. You had to work extra hard. First of all, did you know that going in? Then, hopefully, if you didn't, I'm glad you didn't because you did it anyway, but did you know that going in? Then, can you share what that struggle was like to get to the point where you're at right now?

Annette: I did not know how difficult it would be. [laughs]

Becky: Good for us. [laughs]

Annette: On many levels. Starting from trying to do clinical trials with wild animals that just go out there and you can't contain them. Just everything about this was unique. Like you said, if this had been a poultry vaccine or for a dog or a cat, there's a regulatory path. If you go to the regulator and say, "This is a new product," you know exactly what to do. You know exactly what the trial design would look like, what the endpoints would look like. In our case, we had to make the argument to the regulator that honeybees are animals, and they're classified as livestock.

If what we're doing is exposing, in a very controlled manner, the animal to a dead pathogen, the next generation of larvae are less likely to become sick. Clearly, we are stimulating the immune system and by definition, it should be classified as a vaccine, but it wasn't clear that this would be a vaccine. We had to go and lay this out to fall into this regulatory path for animal vaccine development with all the rigors that you would expect from a dog or a cat or a poultry or a cattle vaccine. That was one of the very novel and unique things about this project where there was no path forward.

We really had to create it. Also, from an investor's side, everybody loved the project, everybody thought that this was fantastic, and somebody had to do it. If you go into a completely new space where investors don't understand the beekeeping market, the industry, the lack of knowledge of how the industry actually works, how money is made in the industry, pollination services, honey production, propolis, royal jelly, bee wax, all of that. It's like most people that you talk to, and you know this probably, Tim, when you say, "Well, beekeepers, they have two hives and it's your quirky uncle that has them in their little yard." That's obviously not true, and we know that that's not true, but the public doesn't know.

It's an industry or at least five years ago, despite the fact that everybody was talking about bees dying and the importance of bees, what the industry actually looks like and the struggles of the industry was largely unknown. Raising money when investors don't understand the risk, they don't understand what the revenue looks like, they can't make economic projection. You have the research risk, you have the regulatory risk where you don't know, can this even become a product that you can sell? Does it work? Is it going to work when you work with wild animals? Can you show efficacy and safety under these conditions that are required for approval?

Then how are you going to get it to a beekeeper? How would this work? If you have a new mineral water, if you have a new shoe, you can go to a shoe store and sell it there. You can go to a supermarket for a bee vaccine, completely novel. Tim, you've experienced it. If your pet gets sick, you go to the vet and you trust the vet to be the expert in the field and say, "Okay, I recommend X, Y, Z." With beekeepers, that person doesn't exist. It is literally us in the company working really closely with the beekeeper to explaining what does this mean? Why is this useful or not useful, or where is it useful? Where is it not?

What is this regulated product where most products in the industry can just be bought without regulations and used off-label? In our case, that's not. We had to really on every single level make sure we have that communication. We have that path forward. Luckily we got to this point where we got an approved product. We are working with beekeepers, we're selling it. Beekeepers can purchase queens, they do vaccinated queens, they can purchase the vaccine. We're working all these things out.

Tim: We've talked about the vaccine in prior episodes with different researchers and specifically with Keith. Can you redescribe quickly or briefly the vaccine process? We're used to injections, so we're not giving little injections. Can you describe the vaccine process for the queens?

Annette: Yes. The vaccine, it's an oral vaccine and it is mixed. When I was a child, the polio vaccine, I got it on a little sugar cube before they developed an injectable formulation. Here, it's very similar. The vaccine is liquid and it gets mixed into the queen candy, into the sugar paste, and fed to the nurse bees because the queens, as you know, don't like to eat themselves, they like to be fed for the most part. We feed it to nurse bees and the nurse bees take it up, digest it, transport the sugar with the little pieces of the vaccine in it to the glands to make the royal jelly. Then the royal jelly now contains the vaccine and is fed to the queen.

The queen digests it, takes it up, puts it into the fed body, and from there it gets transported to the ovaries and the developing larva will see the little pieces of bacteria and start mounting an immune response. This is important because for a lot of those diseases, they're brood diseases. The larvae in the first few days after hatching are the most vulnerable and you want to be sure that that's when they are protected, that's when they need to be protected. The queen will encounter American foulbrood or European foulbrood, but that's not the worker bees. They're not going to get sick from it. It's the larvae that will suffer.

Being able to protect the larvae before they hatch is really, really critical. The nice thing is we don't have to treat three times a year, open the hive, and revaccinate. It's like the new queen will have the vaccine, will have taken the vaccine up through the feeding and then she will lay the eggs that will be protected, and the colony is protected. This process of transgenerational immune priming, what it's called insect is common across insects. It's not unique to honeybees that the maternal insect can pass on the information on, "Hey, there's a disease out there, there is a problem here in the colony," and make sure the next generation gets this information.

The vaccine is just building on that natural process, which is making sure that we are exposing the queen in a very controlled way before she's entering the new colony that she may or may never have seen before. A queen, if she's introduced into a new hive that had another colony there before, you don't know what was in that hive. The queen and the next colony, we make sure that they are protected to whatever they're going to encounter. For the first vaccine, obviously, it's one disease, it's American foulbrood, but other vaccines are coming.

Tim: That's really a novel approach and it really lays the groundwork for future vaccines, I assume.

Annette: Yes, absolutely. As you know, there are, it's European foulbrood, American foulbrood, chalk root, deformed wing virus. There are so many diseases. What we did is, like you said, we had to develop all these different aspects of getting this new technology from conception, from idea in a lab to actually in a bottle and out into the market that we were really focused. We're doing one vaccine, one that to show that this is possible and that we can have impact. Just like other vaccines, you have to show efficacy, you have to show safety, you have to show purity, identity. It has to be manufactured in a licensed facility in a USDA-licensed facility, very controlled. Every batch that we make, we have to send samples to the USDA, they get tested for purity.

It's really a rigorous process. We did it for this first vaccine and now we're branching out and obviously, we have to do efficacy studies, but also studying and some of this work we did with Keith Dalaplane to show what happens in the field when you have a vaccinated colony. Does that make a difference? How big is the difference? The reason is when you develop animal vaccines, what the regulator requires is that you conduct lab efficacy in the lab in a very, very controlled conditions where you know exactly how much the dose of the disease is that you are exposing the animals.

You can repeat it. You have a way to test it several times and show no, this is the efficacy. Particularly with notifiable diseases like American foulbrood that are so contagious, you can't infect in the field. It's not a good idea. The animals are wild animals, so you can't even have a quarantine area. It's not possible. What we do is we have the hives in the field, the colonies, we have a certain number of vaccinated and unvaccinated colonies. They're blinded. The researchers don't know which one is which. Then they take one-day-old larvae. Anybody that has ever crafted knows a one-day-old larva, really, really tiny.

Becky: Very small.

Annette: They are cleaned in a petri dish in the lab and blasted with very, very high doses of disease. In American foulbrood, those are 5,000 or 10,000 spores that these tiny one-day-old larvae have to now fight off. Typically, a few spores is sufficient to kill a larva. Then we wait. We feed them, we transfer them a new feed every few days, and then after a week or 10 days, we look, are they dead or alive? Under these extremely harsh conditions, if the vaccinated group makes it, that's a pretty good indication that there's efficacy in the vaccine. That when you go out into the field where you now have the colony, you have nurse bees, you have the entire colony being able to raise the temperature, you have royal jelly that can be fed.

Also, if there's one larva that gets sick, it can be removed from the colony. It's when you have too much disease that all of a sudden, the system doesn't work anymore. It starts collapsing. You're overloaded. What a vaccine is trying to do is to lower the number of larvae that are just not doing so well so that the colony as a whole can take care of it, can still move on. Whether it's humans or chickens, it's the same idea in a beehive. They are all working together. Having efficacy in a very harsh condition in the lab, the assumption is that you're going to have a much, much higher efficacy in the field.

We, of course, still want to test this just to have hives out there and say, "What does that mean even if we don't get disease?" You can't predict when American foulbrood will hit. You just have to sit there and wait or work with many beekeepers across the country to see what do they experience in their-- if you have the cold and all of a sudden, you get the flu virus or if COVID hits, you're probably okay dealing with one thing, but if it gets too much-- so for us, taking one stressor out of the equation, is the colony better able to deal with other stresses that are there, whether it's weather, whether it's a pesticide? That's also what we want to see. What happens if you do this approach in the field?

Jeff: We'll bring in the field expert, Tim Ferris, the beekeeper. Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Tim, could you share with us how you started your relationship with Dalan Animal Health?

Tim: I actually saw a publication about it. It was a industry fly that went out. Then I followed up with a phone call contact and email. Really straightforward. It was a industry publication.

Becky: Was it asking for beekeepers to be a part of the process?

Tim: They were looking at that stage to expand past their field trials to get a syndicate of known beekeepers throughout the country to implement the vaccine, to share knowledge backwards and forwards, and to potentially become retail partners.

Becky: Was it something that you gave thought to or were you just immediately invested in being a part of this novel technology?

Tim: Oh, so that's a great question. If we take that to a different angle, in Pennsylvania, we have different procedures. Each state has different procedures. As Pennsylvania as an example, with AFB, we have a quarantine period where we can either treat with antibiotics, what you need a veterinary prescription for, which is a catch-22 because most vets don't know what bee diseases are. We're lucky enough in our operation to be connected with different veterinarian practices in the area and also with university vet schools.

On the other flip side, you can shake your bees off and put them on undrawn foundation so you can get rid of all, basically, the brood structure inside that cavity. Then the flip on that is you can still have spores on your boxes. We also have gamma irradiation as a facility to sterilize equipment, which is also an option for repopulating dead-out hives.

The other issue with antibiotic treatment is there's strains of the AFB that will not be pushed down or cleared up by antibiotics. They'll do lab testing at Beltsville for you and then you can work out what options you have. Then you have quarantine stickers that go on your hives and you can then further have them inspected. In one aspect of that, we have a neighboring hive facility operation within half a mile of one of our apiary yards that had AFB a few years ago. The equipment was sterilized but even though we had it sterilized, there's no way we know that we've got it completely controlled.

From a robbing perspective in the fall or even high moisture contents that we're having this year with AFB that's coming through, some of those diseases to an untrained eye look fairly similar. When we say that, when a vaccine is available, we're very much interested in at least trialing out doing one-to-one comparisons, same daughter comparisons with new queen stock coming through, and being very early on with the connection between the two companies looking at the pipeline development of what's coming through in the future.

Jeff: Are you raising your own queens and then giving them the vaccination?

Tim: Yes. We're doing it in multiple ways. At this stage, we're doing the candy application with making up a ball of candy and we're actually injecting a singular ball with 0.2 milliliters of the vaccine. The vial is a 10 ml vial. You divide that out by 50, it gives you the 0.2. That way we know we've got a controlled amount per queen that's going into each cage for the nurse bees to eat and transfer to the queen. We have that application.

Off-label, what we're looking at and have been discussing protocol with Karen Roccasecca who's the state aparist and the universities we've teamed up with, is looking at making up royal jelly and adding the vaccine to the royal jelly to bypass the nurse bee application. Also potentially, in the grafting stage, doing a wet graft with the vaccine and the royal jelly combined and then using those cells to do instrumental contamination to breed bees.

Yes, we do breeding. Traditionally it's been only in the local market for people to pick up because where we've found is the replacement of queens in July where people have had mortality rates with different treatment methods for Varroa mite. Then when you ship bees at that time of year from further south from the main breeding facilities in Georgia or Florida, then you get not a sterile queen that turns up, but the sperm in the spermatheca sack can be damaged and heat transfer when they're coming through.

The last couple of years there's also been issues with the logistics where the queens will get lost or there's a high mortality rate with those queens. We can produce a high-quality product that's well-bred locally in our region at the moment.

Jeff: What's your experience with the vaccination and have you had any problems with American foulbrood? I guess that's not a fair test, but that is a fair question.

Tim: That's an okay question. In our operation in New Zealand, because we're a dual country being the opposite hemisphere there we've been able to do a lot of research down there in product development. We lost 40 hives to AFB about 10 years ago. With that, the process in New Zealand, all we could do was basically burn off all the wood where all the frames. That's the only policy they have, is dig a hole and burn it.

In the Philadelphia market, so Pennsylvania, there was not an outbreak because the process of inspection and everything from the quarantine aspect has worked so far, where the apiary inspector was notified of an issue, they came in and inspected, a treatment protocol, and plan was put in place and the yard was isolated.

That being a neighboring yard to us, we have put vaccinated bees into those surrounding yards. We also have test yards that we're doing for further research as well. That's an example where we would fully endorse using vaccinated queens. That was basically from the purchase of used equipment from outside the region that was contaminated by buying the gear. Another example could be Massachusetts this past summer had an outbreak. There was basically a corridor up the main road where bees traveled and bees were sold and you had basically human transfer of the equipment going through. There was a known track of where the outbreak was. Those surrounding yards there are at least 10-15 years, in my opinion, would be a prime spot for the AFB vaccinated queens.

Becky: Tim, I'm assuming the difference now between you monitoring for AFB now versus prior is that you're actually collecting bees and sending them in for analysis now, and before you're just looking for signs and symptoms?

Tim: Yes and no. Yes, you have the rope test, which was the standard. Then you have now the chemical markers when they're in stock that you can get them. We have done a little bit of lab testing, one, it's expensive to do or there's a time delay with it. We are more connected with the gamma radiation side with the sterilization of the used equipment or the off-season equipment. With that, we are continuously talking with the Apiary inspectors or the State Apiaries from different states. They'll ask us the testing methods on gamma radiation and how we've done things like that. For example, we had a call from Texas a couple of weeks ago, where they haven't had AFB for a decade, reported. Pennsylvania was talking with Karen Roccasecca this morning, last year there was no reported AFB in Pennsylvania.

Doesn't mean it's not here, doesn't mean it's not in everyone's hives, just means it hasn't been reported. I know Pittsburgh on the western side of the state has had AFB in the last couple of years. From our geographical location, Pittsburgh is six hours drive away whereas we're three calls an hour in Delaware or Maryland. You could then get to start playing around with interstate and the biosecurity lines for state protocols, interstate permits, et cetera. We do cutouts in Maryland where it might be a week before the inspector can get there. By that time, the brood that we've removed is either starting to rot or there's issues with it and we basically burn it on site. From a lab testing perspective, yes, we can do tests. At the same time, you can look at your brood patterns, you can look at perforations, you can do the ropey tests, you can do the packet unit that's there as well.

Jeff: Well this is quite a development for beekeepers. Becky and I were talking earlier, that before Varroa, American Foulbrood was the big disease, the big concern for all beekeepers. I remember those days, I really do. The development of a vaccine is fantastic news. I will say that there has been some discussion that American Foulbrood is really not a problem anymore, but I agree with Tim, that even though it's not flaring up like it has in the past, it is still prevalent and we should treat for it. It makes me want to think though, this delivery method, this approach for giving vaccination to honeybees has a great future. Annette, can you share with us any future directions that Dalan is looking at?

Annette: Something that we hope to be very in the near future is for deformed wing virus. I know this is on everybody's mind because of the Varroa mites. I think, when I talked to beekeepers or also academics, I spoke with the government lab the other day. Is it the mite or how much does the mite actually is the problem or is the biggest issue that the colony gets stressed by the viruses that get transmitted and the lowering of the immune response and the immune system by the mites? If you strengthen the immune system and you lower the risk of infection with the virus, can the colony handle the mites better and do a lot more to get rid of the mites that we don't need so much miticides that are used right now? Can we lower at least the amount of miticides that we're using in the hives?

Also there you have the problem with resistance, at some point, it doesn't work anymore, this was the same issue with antibiotics. Can we help by adding these novel tools to the equation? It doesn't mean that it has to replace anything, but at least can we do more for the health of these colonies? Yes. Short term, European Foulbrood, as well as the deformed wing virus vaccine, is in the pipeline. Hopefully, we don't have to wait too long. I did want to pick up on something that Tim had mentioned. Beehives do move around and even if the beehives don't move, the bees do not respect state borders.

[laughter]

Annette: If you deal with animals like this, you need to have tools for disease control that just take a more holistic approach than just one colony. But really look at what is 2 kilometers away, what is miles or 3 miles or 4 miles away, that I make sure that, not only the bees that come back into my colony are protected, but also that we don't spread anything by accident. Even if there's a quarantined yard, what does that mean for surrounding yards? Can we help? Vaccination has proven in other livestock extremely effective in doing this. Even on livestock rabies vaccines of wild animals that just-- the prairie hounds that are out there. These approaches are very effective and we need to do more for this important animal.

Becky: I would also just remind beekeepers, even if they haven't seen AFB in their colonies, it is a devastating disease for the animal and it is so contagious. When we're dealing with a pathogen that is so easily spread, that any support that you can give your animal to fight it or prevent it is so critical. Just because it isn't very common, I don't think it should be discounted, the importance of preventing the disease.

Tim: Becky, in saying that we had AFB testing done in New Zealand of BEE-VAM. We actually had AFB spores being transferred with our bee venom-collecting machines. You look at the regulations that we have now for interstate borders, for example, works pretty well on the commercial scale when you're selling product, when product is just given away or it's by generation given from a grandfather down to a granddaughter from Massachusetts down to Pennsylvania. Well, I had a phone call about that today. You have ignorance is bliss from a lot of beekeepers in the industry.

A lot of the backyard beekeepers can't even find their queen, let alone identify eggs or the brood pattern properly or then looking up disease. It's almost we want to protect the industry, at the same time, education is at the forefront. At the same time, in the backyard setting there seems to be a rollout after three years. Usually, if you become a beekeeper within three years, about 90% of them drop out of it. They either lose their hives or it gets too hard and that gear gets handed on to someone else on a marketplace exchange, right?

We've just gone through COVID, in our area where wealthier landowners used to go to their beach house or used to travel to Europe, they've gone into beekeeping. We have seen a surge of beekeeping in our area and the support structure is struggling to keep up. Pennsylvania has seven different regions for inspection. There's only five current employees as the inspector's looking around. Just in our county alone, there's 700 registered beekeepers. It's one of those catch-22s is we do beginners courses, looking at disease courses to try and educate our neighbors because we have a significant investment, and then beekeeping. They may have $1,000 down, but we've got close to a million dollars invested. It's for us the vaccine makes a lot of sense, and educating people around us also is a big thing.

Jeff: Well, this is fantastic. I tell you, I hate to be the party pooper here, but we're running out of time. This is such a fascinating discussion, every aspect of the vaccine research, how the vaccine works. That's an impact on beekeeping in the beekeeping industry is fascinating and all warrant their own separate discussion. I'm hoping I can invite both of you back maybe together, maybe separately. We can talk about this and other areas it may lead to. Would you be willing to come back and continue the discussion at a later date?

Tim: Yes, absolutely.

Annette: Absolutely. We have to spread the word. We have to tell people how important, everyone, how important these animals are and how important it is to protect them.

Becky: Well said.

[background music]

Jeff: Very good. Well, thank you so much, and we will definitely have you back.

Tim: Thanks, Jeff. Thank you, Becky.

Annette: Thank you both. Thank you, Tim.

Jeff: These are the developments of beekeeping that are really exciting. I enjoy talking with people like Annette from Dalan, and with Tim.

Becky: I was just talking to somebody about how important it is to make beekeepers aware of how when research is done with something that supports the industry, how hard it is to get that research conveyed into actually, "Buy this queen," or, "Use this new treatment." The story of this vaccine is really inspiring for our industry.

Jeff: It is. Like I mentioned before, the implications of the development of this vaccine, I think are really promising. As Annette talked about the future directions with the European foulbrood, deformed wing virus especially. I'm looking forward to those days.

Becky: I know. I can't wait till that research is completed, they've gone through the regulatory process and more support to the bees awaits us.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple podcast wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any web page.

We want to thank our regular episode sponsors Betterbee, Global Patty, StrongMicrobials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you the  Beekeeping Today Podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments at the Leave a Comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:53:24] [END OF AUDIO]