Dalan Animal Health has received government approval for an oral vaccine designed to protect honeybee queens and their offspring from American Foulbrood, a deadly bacterial disease. The vaccine aims to safeguard bee populations and the crops they pollinate, addressing the significant losses beekeepers face annually due to various threats including parasites, pesticides, and nutritional deficiencies.
Dalan Animal Health is working to sell its bee vaccine s to commercial beekeepers and governments – and potentially expand to other invertebrates.Those are the questions Annette Kleiser has been wrestling since founding Dalan Animal Health in 2018. Five years after launching the startup, the government approved an oral vaccine her team created that’s designed for the world’s beekeepers to feed to worker bees, which then feed it to their queens in royal jelly.
Kleiser and her team at Athens, Georgia-based Dalan Animal Health believe specially designed bee vaccines are an important tool in keeping more bees alive, enabling commercial beekeepers to continue bringing them around the country so they can pollinate crops like almonds, blueberries, cucumbers and apples.
“If someone cuts their winter losses in half because of these vaccinated queens, it would spread like wildfire.” But there’s a major hurdle: convincing beekeepers that the cost of $10 per vaccine is worth it. “Everyone is interested,” Shook toldRussell Heitkam, whose Heitkam’s Honey Bees is a major producer of queens , said his customers are actively trying to understand the economics and value of vaccination. For a commercial beekeeper with 30,000 hives, the cost of vaccinating at $10 a queen adds up quickly, to roughly $300,000.
Adds Chris Hiatt, a commercial beekeeper with Hiatt Honey who is also president of the American Honey Producers Association: “In beekeeping, it’s word of mouth. If someone cuts their winter losses in half because of these vaccinated queens, it would spread like wildfire.”
Bee Vaccine Honeybee Health American Foulbrood Pollination Agriculture
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