European Foulbrood with Dr. Meghan Milbrath (S6, E22)

S6, E22 - European Foulbrood with Dr. Meghan Milbrath

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

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

Kim Flottum: I'm Kim Flottum.

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Jeff: Becky, one of the things popping up again is the whole native versus non-native discussion. We will have more on that in the next couple of episodes with some other guests. That is such an interesting debate. I was at a beekeepers' meeting this last weekend and it came up as well.

Becky: Jeff, was that Washington State Beekeepers Association meeting?

Jeff: Yes, Becky. I'm glad you asked. Washington State Beekeepers Association meeting. I was there and presented along with many other great people.

Becky: That was a star-studded lineup of bee presentations. That was an impressive lineup, including yourself. I was a little jealous that I wasn't at that meeting.

Jeff: [laughs] That was a good group of people and it was fortunately right here in Olympia and I was able to meet many great listeners and the panelists were all good too. The whole native versus non-native, if you were to give one word of advice as a tease for future episodes but for beekeepers who are going around and talking to friends and they say, "Well, aren't honeybees harmful to native pollinators?" That's the key phrase. What would be your response? What can a beekeeper who loves both honeybees and bubble bees and native bees, what could be a possible reply?

Becky: Jeff, that is an excellent question. I talk to beekeepers about this all the time because I think that it is our responsibility to understand the competition issue. More importantly, we need to understand where this competition is stemming from. That's the current pollinator habitat crisis we have. We have seen honeybees suffer because of a change in land use and we've seen their honey production suffer. Of course, if it's impacting our honeybees, it's going to be impacting other bees out there. This isn't a matter of honeybees versus native bees.

This is a matter of everybody who loves bees and who wants great pollination, managed and native wild pollination to occur. We all need to get on board and support more habitat for these pollinators.

Jeff: There you go, folks. Just a little tease. In future episodes, we do have guests lined up to talk about this topic. For me, I'm just coming off of this meeting with Washington State Beekeepers Association. It was a topic both in the discussions and in the hallways. I was just jumping at the bit to ask Becky today.

Becky: What was your talk about to beekeepers?

Jeff: [laughs] No surprise to our listeners. My topic was using technology in the bee yard, so it's all of the gadgets or some people would call toys. I call them electronic devices in the bee yard to help monitor what's happening in the beehive at any given moment.

Becky: I bet you had an enthusiastic audience.

Jeff: They were all, I would suspect, lovers of technology and what you can do, including the temperature sensors, the humidity sensors, the scales, there's the baseline. Then we also talked about drones and not only the male bees, but also the quadcopters and using those in a bee yard or using those to find drone congregation areas as we had a guest many episodes ago, Julia Mahood, find my DCA, find my drone congregation area.

Becky: I love that.

Jeff: It was fun. I let my geek flag fly. [chuckles] I can't say that fast.

Becky: Can we use drones to find out what our habitat looks like a couple of miles around our bee yards, go to different places, and map it out? [chuckles]

Jeff: Absolutely, you can. Of course, there's a drone that can do everything. The challenge with any of this is that technically, per the FAA, you have to keep your drone within visual line of sight. You can do that in multiple ways but yes, it's a good idea. I think several years ago, Kim and I suggested to beekeepers to look at Google Maps and to get an idea of a two-mile radius around their hives to see what's around. Of course, there's the old drive or my preference, ride a bike.

Becky: Oh, there you go. The problem with Google Maps sometimes is that it catches it when nothing is blooming. You have to go when the flowers are blooming sometimes to get a good idea. That's really interesting that you're able to share all those tech info gadgets with beekeepers.

Jeff: Yes, it is fun.

Becky: Jeff, Meghan was at that meeting with you, correct? Meghan Milbrath?

Jeff: Meghan was at the conference and was able to sit and talk with her quite a bit and looking forward to having her on the show today.

Becky: I can't wait. Looking forward to talking to her.

Jeff: Meghan is assistant professor at Michigan State University in the Department of Entomology. She was on our show back in June of 2020 with Dr. Kirsten Traynor talking about what she was doing. This is our first opportunity to talk with Meghan directly. Let's do that real quick right after we hear from our friends at Strong Microbials.

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbial site, make sure you click on and subscribe to The Hive, their regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting across the virtual  Beekeeping Today podcast table is Dr. Meghan Melbrath, assistant professor at Michigan State University in Lansing. [chuckles] Meghan, it's taken a lot to get you here. Thanks for being on the show.

Meghan Melbrath: Thanks for having me.

Becky: So happy to see you again, Meghan.

Meghan: Likewise.

Jeff: Meghan, you were on the show last with Kirsten Traynor back in 2020. That was a one-on-one with Kirsten and didn't get the opportunity to talk to you. I did talk to you recently at the Washington State Beekeepers Meeting, and that was a good time to get caught up and it was nice to see you there.

Meghan: Yes, that was a wonderful meeting. I learned a lot and had fun.

Jeff: I'm glad you did. I have to say, though, that I wished I hadn't talked to you so much because I guess I got distracted. In the process of all of that, somehow I got nominated to be on the board of Washington State Beekeepers Association and I wasn't around to decline the nomination. So if I have to blame somebody, I'll blame you.

Becky: Maybe Meghan was part of that plan. Maybe it was a bigger conspiracy than you actually think. [chuckles]

Meghan: Yes, it's actually why they asked me out there.

Becky: Just talk to them about ESB.

[laughter]

Jeff: No, I'm just kidding, of course. It was fun to see you and talk to you and meet many of your peers and listen to you on the panel discussion too. That was good and very informative. We've invited you here really to give us an update on what you're doing recently. There's a couple of specific things that we'll get to. One being, I'd like to hear an update on what are veterinarian students learning about honeybees today? We learned early on what they might be learning but what are they learning in 2023? Then also, European foulbrood is a big topic of interest. I know you're up to speed on that.

For those who don't know you, why don't you give us a little bit of background about yourself, your bee operation, and then we'll get into those other topics?

Meghan: As mentioned, I'm currently working as an assistant professor at Michigan State University. My appointment is basically half extension, half research, and 10% teaching and all of that teaching is in the veterinary school with a vet student rotation. Then I also am a beekeeper on the slides. I've been keeping bees off and on since I was a kid and then more seriously as a business since about 2011. I'm in South Central Michigan and I run a beekeeping and queen-rearing operation down there.

Becky: Meghan, you just told us that your job is 110%, does it feel like it's 110% of your time? [laughs]

Jeff: I was doing the math too, but I didn't want to interrupt her.

Meghan: I'm one of those people who is very busy, but if I had more time, I would just get more hives or pick up another project or write another grant. The joys of loving what you do I guess. I'm definitely working two jobs and it feels like two jobs.

Becky: You have a new bee building at MSU, right?

Meghan: We do have a new bee building, yes. I think the last time I was on here we were in the process of acquiring it, but now we have a new facility that is mostly the way done remodeled that we can keep bees out of, which is fantastic.

Becky: Makes your job a little bit easier.

Meghan: It makes my job a million times easier. It was tough before.

Jeff: For someone who's never been into bee building before what does that mean? What does that entail? Is that just like a face plate on a building or is it an actual Quonset hut, what is it?

Meghan: [chuckles] Ours is definitely a unique situation. We had a facility on campus that was built for a professor that does indoor animal air quality, which sounds lovely. In reality, this might be the first thing we cut. It is where you put animals into stalls and have them poop into buckets and then you record the [crosstalk] and let air come out of it. Which if you think about it, is very important for animal production and animal welfare and things like that.

Someone at the time took actual posters of animals pooping in buckets and blew them up to poster sites so we still have them in the building. I can tell you exactly what it was used before. Obviously, it was cleaned then ahead of time. Becky mentioned twice my love of biosecurity and my fascination with fecal-transmitted diseases. A lot of the HVAC was out from the 90s and so that building, part of it was used for quite a few years, part of it was actually never used and it's just been for storage.

The research that was happening in that facility ended and it was used for storage and then we were able to work out getting it from the other departments, the animal sciences, and move it into entomology and south campus area farms. Michigan State's really lovely in that we have the central campus and then just south we have fully operating farms right on campus. We're right across from the dairy, which means that we're in the land of milk and honey and it's by far the best part on campus.

We got funding from the department and the college to remodel part of it. We made a honey house so we can actually extract our own honey. We had been taking it out to commercial places and just paying by the pound previously. We have spaces that are set up now for more equipment storage. We have a little sampling processing room where we can do all of our mite washes. I have my office there, we have some other bee people. Our extension apiculture educator is stationed out there. It's basically our house where we run all of my bee experiments, all of our teaching had the vet student rotation out there.

Zachary Huang, who's another bee researcher at MSU operates out of that building. They house our BIP Tech transfer team employees. Lots of bee stuff is happening there.

Jeff: That's really exciting.

Meghan: It's wonderful. Yes.

Jeff: You mentioned the former professor did what kind of research?

Meghan: Animal indoor air quality.

Jeff: Indoor air?

Meghan: Yes.

Jeff: Okay. I wanted to make sure because I didn't hear that quite clearly. Indoor air quality.

Meghan: I'm pretty sure that's right. There's a sign to that effect but yes, it's air quality.

Jeff: I'm sure it was an undergrad student who had to carry the buckets from point A to point B. What a bad job. Anyways, that sounds like it's a much-needed improvement there and the work that you're doing I'm sure is well worth the effort the university put into it. That's exciting.

Meghan: Yes.

Becky: Can we go from poop buckets to European foulbrood? Is that a good transition? [laughs]

Jeff: It's parallel.

Meghan: I can tell you're a professional.

[laughter]

Becky: I'll just preface this. We had a great talk the other day with Jerry Hayes of Bee Culture who was doing a little bit of a deep dive into blueberries and pollination and bees coming out with EFB potentially. He ended up with Meghan as a resource and we had a great probably hour. We don't have time for it today, but we had about a great hour just of EFB blueberries pollination. We just listened to Meghan for that time. Can you do it in less than an hour and still get all that information and [chuckles] share it with us? Because you're doing amazing work, Meghan. I remember when you were starting getting into European foulbrood and doing a deep dive in that, but you've really made huge progress.

Meghan: I'm glad you think so because I actually went through and listened to the 2020 recording, which was a lot on European foulbrood, and three years ago feels like we've gotten so far and also still know nothing about it. I think one of the things we talked about is just how important it's economically. It's one of the most important diseases in terms of having an effect on beekeepers and honey production and colony health.

It is so misunderstood or not heavily researched and poorly understood. Even though I've been working on it I guess in the three years since we talked, I've been working on it since about 2018, it still feels like we're just answering some of these super simple questions and so much remains unknown. One of the things I was excited about when we were at the Washington meeting was that there are a few more people joining our ranks as being EFB researchers. That was really thrilling to find out.

Becky: We're at a spot from what you said was that the EFB we used to worry about, it might be a little bit different now as far as the scale and as you mentioned, the economic impact. Can you bring people up to date about that?

Meghan: One of the things that I discussed in the last one that the reason that I got into EFB research is because beekeepers just bring it up as this thing that happens in the springtime, especially following blueberry production. The commercial beekeepers that I work with always mentioned yes, it's really bad. The first two years, we really just been collecting data on how bad is it, what are the prevalence rates? Turns out they were correct, it was bad.

One of the characteristics or one of the ways that it's often characterized, I should say, is that people call it spring brood disease and that it just goes away right away. What we found when we followed colonies, sometimes into September, you still see signs of disease and that isn't in line, at least with what a lot of people tell me. Like I say, I've only been studying it since 2018 and that's really when it actually started to affect my own bees as well.

I don't have a lot of historical experience with it, but when you talk to other beekeepers, it used to not be taken quite as seriously. One thing though is we just don't have a lot of historical data. One of the projects we're working on at the moment is actually doing whole genome sequencing and looking at which strains are circulating in the United States. There are no studies, at least as far as I know, that just say, "Here's what European foulbrood is circulating in the US."

We're about to publish a manuscript that indicates some strains that are circulating, or I guess we're working on it still. It's about strains that are circulating in the United States and then hopefully with the whole genome data, that we can actually look into some of the characteristics of these strains and see how they relate to different colony health outcomes.

Jeff: That would be interesting to find out. I had never even considered the different strains of European foulbrood

Meghan: Peter Fowler, who is a licensed veterinarian and then a PhD student that's been working with me, we both have a love for all the old literature. It was characterized in 1912 and obviously, they were not taking photographs, but they have drawings. We were just discussing yesterday, looking at these old drawings, some of them look just spot on like we see and some of them look different, and wondering if there's definitely space and time between those figures and what we see now. If there's strain variation or what was the difference between those, which is interesting. For a disease that was characterized so early, there's surprisingly little known about it.

Jeff: Dr. Jimmy Tew and I have talked on his podcast on  Honey Bee Obscura about old equipment and there's always this discussion about recycling old frames, brood frames, and everything. It would be really interesting to go through some of these old-time beekeepers through their equipment from 30 years ago or something like that, get some scrapings out of those old brood combs to compare that to anything that's present today.

Meghan: Now you're touching on one of my favorite topics too about dormancy. Everybody's excited about bacterial dormancy. I know but--

Becky: Keeps me up at night really. [laughs]

Jeff: Yes. I was just watching a Netflix the other day about that.

Becky: Isn't Brad Pitt starring in that one?

Jeff: I think so.

Meghan: Oh my gosh, you guys. The American foulbrood does have a spore form. Spores are super environmentally stable. Melissococcus plutonius, the one that causes EFB does not have a spore form. It should not be that dormant. We have just tested colonies that have died from it and old equipment a little bit but what we've been doing more systematically is looking at how long it persists on different equipment. We tested a few strains, so one is the classic registered trademark strain that researchers use and then we tested some strains that were circulating.

We did that as a pilot project with a veterinary student, Robin Howley last summer. She was there for the summer so we put the bacteria on wooden wear, we put it on wax, we put it on Canvas representing your bee suit, we put it on metal representing hive tools. We left it in the air just sitting out and then we looked to see if we could still recover it after a couple of weeks. She tested it one week and two weeks and three weeks and four weeks and could always get it back. Honey was a little more variable which makes sense.

Then we have now dragged that out to a year and for the strains that are circulating, we can find it on all those materials. This is a bacteria again that does not have a spore form and it's becoming dormant. The experiment that we haven't done yet is to look to see if after it sits, if it's still infectious. We're hoping to do that, to continue that study to look at different strains, to look at different materials, to look at different disinfectants, and then also to see if these ones after they've been sitting out in the environment if they're still infectious.

Jeff: Hold that thought. We're going to hear from Betterbee and we'll be right back.

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Becky: We just talked to Judy Woo-Smart about rotating out frames and she was focusing on pesticides and how that was important. I'm hearing that it's even maybe more important if you have any disease like EFB potentially in your operation. Can you tell us a little bit about what biosecurity recommendations, not just the frames, but also your hive tool that you're recommending to beekeepers?

Meghan: We do have biosecurity recommendations, but a lot of them are based on here is what we think are best practices and not necessarily based on scientific information that these have been shown to reduce actual pathogen risk. We do talk a lot about hive tools. We are releasing videos of this as part of our veterinary training series that we're doing and that I know we'll talk about later. We do try to keep things very much at a yard level is what we recommend.

One of the incredibly frustrating things about European foulbrood is that the bacteria is found in many places even when you don't see signs of disease including in the adult bees. Which makes it really hard to get rid of because if it was just on the equipment, that would be very simple. When it's in the nurse bees or in the adult bees, even in colonies that don't have signs of disease, you have to picture getting rid of disease that you can't see which is really difficult to beekeepers.

It's very straightforward to say, "Oh, if you have a colony that has signs of disease, take it to a quarantine yard or treat it or wash your hive tool afterwards. It's this if you have a colony that's in the area where there's European foulbrood disease, especially in the same yard, or if you have it in your operation, that you have to be still maintaining these practices. There is an assumption or an understanding that because the bees drift so much that once it's in a yard that you'll see it throughout the same yard.

We did set up a study to look at the different strains that were circulating in different beekeeping operations. We looked at the same operation over many years and then within an operation, we looked at multiple hives in the same yard and multiple yards in the same operation. We're still looking through those data, but I can tell you that it's not straightforward. We can definitely find multiple strains in the same operation over time and over space.

As a scientist, the scientist half of my job is like, "Yay, that's so much job security." The extension person will figure out and help beekeepers. It's like, "Come on, man." It is really complex on how it's spread and how it's shifted between the yards and what the risk is and how much is moved by beekeepers because we know it can both be on the equipment and then also in the adult bees.

Jeff: Out here, many of the beekeepers work with bees in and out of blueberries in the springtime. We've been told that they'll take bees that are healthy into the blueberries and discount on them dealing with European foulbrood when they pull them out. Is there any idea of what specifically on the blueberry fields that it's-- is it the blueberries, is the ground that's causing this, or is it the bees?

Meghan: We hear the same thing and that's definitely an issue in Michigan. That being said, we also have a lot of European foulbrood disease outside of that context. There isn't anything completely unique to blueberry fields that results in disease. Some of our samples come from hobby operations or small-scale operations from backyard and stationary beekeepers. We have European foulbrood on MSU campus which I love as an educator because then I could show it to the veterinarians and show them about it.

We have it in places where there really just aren't blueberries around. We do have a manuscript coming out that does show that we've worked with a beekeeper and had some hives in blueberries, some hives not in blueberries, and had basically the same rate of active EFB infection. It does have an association. One of the things that we do know is that it's highly seasonal. Even in colonies that aren't near blueberries, it tends to show up at the time of blueberry bloom or really right at the end of blueberry bloom.

When we do our study, we would follow colonies the day they were put into blueberries, basically the day they were scheduled to leave blueberries, and then two weeks post-bloom. We would see most of the infection between that leaving blueberries and that two-week post-bloom. However, that's the same timeline as the bees that are not anywhere near blueberries. I'm not saying that there isn't a thing, but it's definitely not the only thing that causes European foulbrood.

Becky: The EFB in beekeeper colonies across the United States, is it being tracked to the level that you would like it to be tracked just because your background is in public health? Are we doing enough as an industry to watch this disease so that we know how it trends or are your experiments doing that for us?

Meghan: No, as an epidemiologist, it's horrifying and I wish there was about 10 billion times more data. I do think it is really underappreciated for the economic costs. There was a study that came out of Alberta that they estimated that it was about $500 per hive which is per highlight had infection if you count in honey loss. When we go out to beekeeping operations and when we were following them all summer, it was horrifying the loss of animal life and the loss of production that was in these colonies. In some of these commercial operations, there's a large amount of money loss.

Anytime that you have an agricultural industry that is affected by a pest or pathogen that's resulting in huge economics, it should be taken more seriously and people really don't take European foulbrood more seriously. I know people are probably going to come at me for this, but I feel like it's worse than varroa.

Becky: That was my next question actually. [laughs]

Meghan: I'll say why first because I just don't want you to use that as a soundbite and then everybody used that. With varroa, there are tools that I really feel like have a good-- it's still very frustrating to deal with and even though I've been managing it the last few years very well, I would not say that I have varroa figured out, but I feel like I have a much better understanding of here's the context in which I would use this tool. I have more confidence in my ability to manage varroa than I have confidence in my ability to instruct someone on how to deal with their European foulbrood. That's coming from somebody who loves it and studies it all the time.

It's really frustrating when we want to talk about treatment but then also when we want to talk about prevention. It is really hard to understand who is at risk of developing disease and what actions we can take that are actually really going to be useful for lowering the amount of disease. I don't think necessarily that we need a registration and inspections and burning hives and things like that. I don't think that that's necessarily economically feasible in most places but I do think that it does deserve a lot more attention and respect as a serious pathogen of honeybee colonies.

Becky: That was great. My follow-up and sad is, do you think that people-- because there's been such an awareness, a lot of my career, a lot of your career has been generating an awareness for varroa. Do you think a lot of people are blaming their colony problems on varroa now and maybe they could have EFB in their operation or although there are very telltale signs often with European foulbrood, but do you think that there might just not be that capacity with some of the beekeepers out there to be able to ID the disease?

Meghan: I'm not sure about them mixing it up with varroa because in a lot of beekeeping operations, that's also underdiagnosed and underappreciated but I do believe that there is a lot of undiagnosed and unmanaged European foulbrood disease. Either by people that just say, "Oh this is spring brood disease and I don't really think about it." In a lot of cases, it does self-resolve and have people who have it and they don't do anything and it goes away. That does make it so that people don't really realize it, that they may have it or they didn't have to do anything so they may not take it seriously.

When we are doing our studies, we're looking at the brood so closely. When we're looking at their disease, we're really doing hearty inspections sometimes during the honey flow. So at times people wouldn't necessarily be doing really, really heavy inspections. Maybe later they see a spotty brood pattern that's unexplained, and that might be all that they notice from it. Or maybe the colonies not making as much honey as they thought and that's all that they know.

Jeff: Just real quick, what's the recommended course of treatment for European foulbrood?

Meghan: Just real quick, solve it for everyone.

[laughter]

Jeff: Yes, sum it up in 25 words or less.

Meghan: MSU is hosting a webinar, so Peter Fowler and I will have one that will be-- by the time this comes out, it should be on our YouTube channel where we do spend quite a bit more time on this but the treatment recommendation really depends on your likelihood of reinfection. There are some places that have taken it very seriously, like an eradication campaign where they basically are treating it like the areas where they treat EFB very aggressively.

Norway's the one that comes to mind where they're actually burning colonies and trying to get rid of the pathogen but in that context, you're not very likely to get reinfected. Obviously, that's not economic if you're in an area that's very, very dense with beekeepers. If I was a small-scale beekeeper and I was really remote and let's say bears took out my colonies and I had to buy my nooks and I happened to have EFB, I might take that seriously enough that I would get rid of some colonies and really treat it seriously so that I wouldn't have that pathogen hanging around.

Because as I mentioned, when you see active disease, that means that pathogen is going to be present in lots of other colonies and so you can't just treat the colony that you see it in. I'm just going to go on a tangent because you guys keep nodding. What we see at MSU and in other operations is that we can mark a colony, "Oh this is the one with EFB," and next spring, that one looks gorgeous, stunning, not a sign of disease, and the one right next to it is coming down.

Then the next year, it flip-flops and so you can easily have a colony that has the pathogen. When we go out and we look and we say, "Are there signs of disease, and then is the pathogen present?" We easily find the pathogen present. I'm not going to say the numbers because we're still working on the data now, but it's in a high proportion so we can find the bacteria when the colonies look gorgeous and perfect and no sign of disease. If you really only focus on the colonies that are showing signs, if you move those to a quarantine yard and just fix those, you're not really solving the problem for you the next spring.

What we don't want to do is have a bunch of people doing an enormous amount of work that doesn't actually reduce their reinfection risk or the idea that it will pop up again. There are some more stricter recommendations if you are really far removed. A few aren't very far removed. I can tell you some things that don't work too. We did try looking at just using probiotics for recovery. We've tried looking at just feeding them protein patties for recovery and it's really hard to do these studies because as I mentioned, a lot of times it can self-resolve as well. T

here's a lot of interest in essential oils or things like that but you have to make sure that you have a very large number of colonies that are going into these treatment trials because there's so much variability even when you're not providing any treatments. We have done some recovery trials, but there isn't anything that we have found that caused the infection to clear up faster than the antibiotics, so oxytetracycline, however, there are cases where it cleans up with no action at all. My first recommendation is if you're very far away, you could take it very seriously. The second recommendation is that you could use watchful weighting depending on the strength of the colony and the severity of disease.

Now if that colony was very, very tiny and high likelihood of being robbed out and the disease was very severe, that's not the recommendation. If you noticed a couple of cells that started to look bad and the colony was overall strong and there was a good honey flow on, wading it out is a thing, but I would be really cognizant that that's now in that yard. You're going to have to be aware of what the risk is in that particular yard and this is where the biosecurity measures become really important because then you can set up boundary systems.

If you're a beekeeper that has three yards, you put all the blue equipment in one yard where the EFB is or you mark those frames or you have a system where you have two separate operations and you can work on it that way. Another thing that we've tried that doesn't work is-- let me see how more depressing I can make this conversation. [laughter] Another thing that we try that doesn't work is just pulling out the brood nest. because also, it creates such a spotty brood pattern that sometimes even if the disease goes away, that bad pattern still remains.

Intuitively it feels very different when you have a colony that is perfectly healthy and you have those nice concentric circles of brood and a colony where there's technically not any sign of disease. You don't see any disease larva, but the pattern's all messed up because it's been messed up for months. I thought if we just take the brood nest out, it gives them a full break in the brood cycle but just trying that on some small scale, we had disease come back within the same summer, let alone coming back the next season. What I have been trying a little bit more this year, which I won't really know how it works till next year, is doing a full shook swarm.

That's something we've used very easily with American foulbrood, where we take the bees and shake them onto brand-new equipment. You can do just that, or you can do that in conjunction with the antibiotics and doing that at the yard level. Again, that would be a situation when you're maybe not eradicating it from the operation so you're moving all of the brood, or all of the rest of the equipment can go into another yard that also has EFB or has issues with it, but then you hopefully clean out that yard.

A lot of what we talk about is really because this pathogen is so widespread, we talk a lot about disease management and control. Preventing spread from yard to yard or reducing spread from yard to yard, reducing it outside of your operation, and then also when your animals get sick, you try to clear it up as quickly as possible.

Jeff: I'm glad you brought up about the veterinarians and the animals because the last part of our little discussion is what are veterinarians learning today about EFB and about honeybees in general. That's a new field of study for them.

Meghan: It has been my absolute delight to start working a lot more with veterinarians, even though I wish it was under a happier context. I do think we need more people working on these issues and bringing in a lot of people with this animal practitioner background. I should say, I'm not even working only with veterinarians, but we work with vet techs and we also are working with a lot of veterinary researchers. They're coming in with this background that is very, very useful for biosecurity fence, for disease management, for disease monitoring, and for also the research.

I think bringing them into the honeybee fold in the long term will be really, really positive. When I work with them, I really have two goals. I have a short-term goal and a long-term goal. The short-term goal is that we at least get some of them that are comfortable enough prescribing antibiotics that we don't have this bacteria disease just run unchecked. If a beekeeper does need them to manage disease and to help the health of their animals that they are able to find someone to have access. I've been very lucky in getting funding to work towards that.

I have some grants in multiple states where we're working to try to develop a cohort of veterinarians that at least are to the point where if a beekeeper calls them, they're not going to just say, "No, I don't work with bees." It's slow but we also don't need a million to do that. We maybe need 5 to 10 in every state. It is, I think, a very reasonable goal. Then the long-term goal is that they're actually useful to the industry. If you think about production medicine, for example, for dairy, a lot of larger production facilities will have a vet on staff that comes in and does their monitoring.

They could send a tech out, do your mite washes, and apply treatments or recommend treatments for you. They could help with other issues. We could have them focused on nutrition research. Even doing more diagnostics. We teach a lot of how to do microscopic diagnostics and a lot of veterinarians have microscopes and are comfortable looking at slides and making slide preps. Having more people that can quickly diagnose EFB is also going to be really useful. I think there's definitely room for them. I think it's just you've got to play the long game on how they fit in. It is going to be really useful.

Jeff: It'd be a whole new chapter in  All Creatures Great and Small have James Alfred Wight look at honeybees. Anyway, I think that's really good to have more resources helping beekeepers. I grew up keeping bees in Ohio and we had county bee inspectors, but that program's gone away for the most part. It was always nice to have that resource available you could call on. Now if veterinarians could fulfill part of that in terms of diagnosis, and take back a sample and put it under a microscope and confirm it for you, that would save Beltsville some headache and shipping samples across the state and everything else. That would be really nice to have. I can see that.

Becky: Great resource, I think. I was able to meet some of the University of Minnesota people interested in, I think some of the training that you provided funding for. I was just helping out that day. They all approached me and said, "Is there a way we can volunteer? Can we volunteer? How can we get more experience?" I think it's a great idea for vet students to set up a bee club. I think you've done a bee club on the MSU campus, but it makes sense to have a vet student bee club so that during each year of their educational training, they have that access to go out to hives and just do hands-on work. I think that could be a really strong option here in Minnesota.

Meghan: Yes. I will happily work with anybody that's associated with any vet school in the US. They can reach out to me because we are trying to get it more-- at MSU, we have the bee club, but then we also try to throw it into every class. If there's a one health class that they learn about bees, if there's an ethics class, they learn about bees. Then we actually just finished our sixth year of our three-week rotation. We have four-year veterinary students go through a rotation and they leave that rotation. It's amazing to see how fast they go from not even knowing what a honeybee looks like to being able really to diagnose disease.

They can do a hive inspection because the one that we do is five days a week, eight hours a day for three weeks. They're really deep into it.

Becky: [laughs] Boot camp.

Meghan: We do just try to get it part of the curriculum so that if they do get a call from a beekeeper, they don't feel like be like, "Wait, these are animals? Wait, we covered this?"

Becky: This is livestock?

Meghan: Your license actually covers you to work with honeybees and so they shouldn't be surprised. We do try to bring it into part of the curriculum. Minnesota is one of the partners on one of the grants that I'm working on. With that one, we have an online course that we're developing. We have a survey that we try to connect with as many veterinarians and vet techs as possible in the US.

Then we organize hands-on clinics so that they can get hive time and organizing Zoom calls for them so that they can stay in contact and we can answer questions. That's the one where we're trying to at least get a cohort of vets that have had in-hive experience, they have a relationship with us. One of their major concerns is their license is at stake. They have to make sure that when they're prescribing an antibiotic or if they're giving you a recommendation, that they will be covered.

They can't just go out willy-nilly and say like, "Oh, here, I'll just write you a script." They do have to do things to make sure that their veterinary client-patient relationship is legit, that they're giving a recommendation or writing an order in a case where it is actually appropriate. A big part of that is they don't know how many hives do you have to look at to set up a VCPR or do you have to wait until you have a formal diagnosis or is it appropriate to use antibiotics and anaphylactic use?

What we're trying to do is have that relationship with them and then be a resource so that they know who to ask so that they can have their paperwork so that they have their butts covered. I've actually had multiple veterinarians call me from the field and ask questions. I'm happy to do that because it allows them to provide the practice or to complete that practice. Then knowing that they've reached out to an expert or they are doing industry standards or things like that allows them to continue to practice.

Becky: That's a great resource. We're going to put your number in the show notes. No, I'm kidding. [laughs]

Meghan: Everything is out there anyway. I know how to put it on mute. [laughter] I do. Any extension professional or someone associated with a vet school that's interested in setting up programs, absolutely you can call me because I would love to help more people set it up in their own states. We've had a really positive response and it's been very fun.

Becky: You're going to be working 120%. Meghan, I need to sneak in a really quick question. I just think the beekeepers are going to want to know really specifically big and small beekeepers, multiple hive tools, I'm assuming that you're disinfecting with bleach. Then also are you recommending putting on latex or nitrile gloves when you're going in and out of the colonies?

Meghan: Oh, yes. The system that we use is we have a box of clean hive tools, and then when they're used, we try to keep it at the yard level. Once they're through a yard, they go to the dirty pile. The dirty pile is just basically a dish bin. Then what we do is we just soak them and bleach water for a while. We do this in the field too so we just bring a jug of water, a little bit of bleach, and then we use Comet scrubbing powder or any powder.

They don't sponsor me. Then try to get all the-- I know and I've reached out and asked both Clorox and Comet to sponsor me, and I haven't got any response, sadly. What we've really focused on is getting everything off the tool, so all of the propolis and wax. We use two tools together to scrape them. I'm doing the hand motion for the listeners. [laughter] You use the tools to scrape them against each other to clean everything off and then use the scruby pad.

That seems to work well for us. We also, for research, do autoclave them. I have a joke that I have a autoclave room in our building and it's an insta pot on a rolling cart that you can actually sterilize things in an insta pot and the hive tools fit.

Becky: Oh, that's great.

Meghan: That's probably overkill for most beekeepers. It's available. There are people for allergic reactions have to wear leather gloves or things like that. Again, my recommendation would be to keep those at the yard level because they're expensive, but they're not that expensive. The hive tools on the hands are the things that go in the hives the most. We do recommend nitrile gloves or washing your hands and just go in bare-handed.

Jeff: Do you get to the extent of wearing booties?

Meghan: I did listen on the last one I talked about-- I got invited to work in Hawaii at different farms and they take biosecurity there very seriously. We did wear booties. I have had conversations, it's actually a snake veterinarian where they have to deal with a lot of fungal issues. For wildlife vets, they deal with fungal diseases a lot and so they do booties. One of the conversations I've had recently is trying to figure out what the role is soil. There is someone at Washington State that is starting to look into that and it's harder to think about how bees would be getting what that exposure route would be.

However, again, we just need so much more EFB research or so much more disease research that it's nice to know where these pathogens are when we're talking about the diseases and where they are, and where they could potentially go.

Jeff: Bees get water from so many diverse and what we would think terribly dirty places. You think, "That manure runoff trickle of water is wow." Back to our poop collection talk from the very first part of the episode.

Meghan: Thank you for bringing it back to poop[crosstalk]

Jeff: It always comes back to poop. [laughs]

Meghan: One of the things too is when they bring up those bacteria back in the hives, bacteria love to share mobile elements. Sometimes they pick it up off of animal runoff or sometimes they pick it up off of plants and then they could get resistance elements or things like that because they could be bringing in bacteria that have had exposure to antibiotics too. There's all sorts of stuff coming in the hive.

Jeff: Meghan, it's been a true pleasure having you back on the show. We've enjoyed having you on and would like to have you back and not wait three years for the next time. We'll definitely be back in touch with you.

Meghan: I'm thinking maybe next week but probably that's too soon.

[laughter]

Becky: We need time to work out all the answers first.

Jeff: At least some of them.

Meghan: No, it's been great. Thank you for having me.

Jeff: Thank you, Meghan.

Becky: Thanks, Meghan.

[music]

Jeff: Becky, I don't know if I am really excited by what we learned or if I'm really depressed by what we learned. There's a lot of good information there. I've not really paid attention much to European foulbrood and now I'm going to look forward around every corner in the beehive.

Becky: Honestly, when I heard her talk about it the first time, I thought, you know what, I was already worried about varroa and viruses and now I am even more worried about what's on my hive tool, what's on my hands. I've got hand sanitizer in the bee truck so that in between yards, I'm definitely sanitizing and I own more than one hive tool at this point. I think beekeepers need to take it seriously. Thank you to Meghan for sharing all that information. She's really doing something important for us.

Jeff: I'll admit that I have more than one hive tool but it's not for sanitary reasons. It's just so that I can always find one. There's a hive tool in every room in my house, I think just because I set it down somewhere.

Becky: That's a whole nother topic. I'll tell you a quick hive tool story but if you learn how to keep bees from me and you set your hive tool down, I'll take it and then you'll really have to look hard for it. We have the don't set your hive tool down rule in our bee yards. [laughs]

Jeff: Cliffs Drool will be happy I mentioned this, but I do have one of those magnetic hive tool holders.

Becky: Oh, that's good.

Jeff: I think that's one of the best little pieces of gadgetry that I have that I just use every time I'm out a bee yard because that's prevented me from laying that hive tool on top of the hive and walking away or laying it down on the ground while I'm bending over. It's just nice.

Becky: You do not want to lose that in a time of needing to pry something open. It's an important tool, a simple tool, an important tool. I bet Betterbee's going to sell a lot more hive tools after this podcast episode.

Jeff: It's always a welcome gift.

Becky: Right.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to rate us five stars on Apple Podcast or 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 webpage. We want to thank our regular episode sponsors Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and especially Betterbee for their longtime support of this podcast.

Thanks to 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 or comments at leave, a comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:54:56] [END OF AUDIO]