Madrid/Guadalaja (Spain), Feb 8 (EFE).- The global decline in bee populations, one of the largest pollinators with more than 20,000 species, could stabilize after the recent approval of a North American vaccine that is being tested in the Spanish municipality of Marchamalo (Guadalajara, center) and in other parts of the world that produce honey.
A few weeks ago, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) licensed the first vaccine against the bacterium Paenibacillus larvae, which causes American foulbrood, a highly virulent and contagious disease of bacterial origin, present in almost 80% of hives around the world and capable of killing entire apiaries, if not properly diagnosed.
This is “magnificent” news, points out to EFE Raúl Rivas González, Professor of Microbiology at the University of Salamanca (center), who indicates that the vaccine is a tool to prevent the disease from spreading, but not to eliminate it: it is a type of environmental bacteria that does not need to infect bees to survive.
The vaccine -Rivas clarifies- will protect commercial pollinators – some fifty species of bees are handled by man – from deadly diseases, in addition to reducing the financial and material losses of beekeepers, but above all facilitating the viability of the planet.
The Spanish Beekeeping Center of Marchamalo, with almost four decades of existence, has collaborated, together with other countries, to carry out this first vaccine for bees. This center was born in response to a demand from the sector that in those years saw its name recognized, the Miel de la Alcarria.
Mariano Higes Pascual and Raquel Martín Hernández, doctors in Veterinary Medicine, are the two researchers who lead the team at the Beekeeping Center and they were contacted three years ago by the North American biotechnology company Dalan Animal, interested in knowing if they were qualified to carry out a clinical trial in the vaccine laboratory.
This center has been in charge of testing the developed vaccine: “It consisted of verifying the efficacy of a substance that was applied to the queens in the food and to see if the immunity that the queen transmits to the larvae is capable of reducing mortality in the disease American foulbrood”, explains Raquel Martín.
The testing, he explains, consists of “supplying the queens and keeping them for a while in the laboratory with some workers and the food where the vaccine comes. After eight days, they are introduced into orphaned hives where the larvae born from these queens confront the American foulbrood bacteria and see if they die or not”.
American foulbrood is caused by a bacterium “and the treatments should be through antibiotics, but the use in hives is prohibited or very restricted, so it is very difficult to deal with an outbreak of this disease,” says Martín.
Higes emphasizes that bees, for some time now and especially due to climate change, have been exposed to many diseases, which is altering their immune activity and making them more sensitive to other pathogens, which is why “having these tools is so important”.
The Marchamalo beekeeping center currently has about 50 employees and is a national and international benchmark, through which numerous researchers have passed to carry out their theses and collaborate on various projects with different universities and countries.
For his part, Professor Raúl Rivas recalls that the global economic value of crop pollination by bees and other pollinators averages more than 200,000 million euros, 10% of the world’s agricultural production of food for humans. .
A world without these pollinators would be “unviable, there would be no future”, says the expert, to explain that a critical percentage of plants are pollinated by insects and if these did not exist, the population and diversity would drop alarmingly, with all the What this means for the planet.
