What's the Deal with the New Vaccine for Honeybees?

The Real Cause of the Plight of Honeybees is not Vaccine Deficiency

In a previous blog titles “Sultan's Harem, Lady Montague, Milkmaids: The Fascinating History of Vaccination,” I shared the interesting story of early vaccines and how their goal was to introduce natural virus samples from wild (rural) settings into the city people’s ecosystems and blood streams. This was partly because people’s immune system in urban populations had been weakened (compromised) after repeated exposure to stressors such as industrial lifestyle and chemicals (air and water pollution) in crowded settings.

Today, honey bees are experiencing a similar plight (of poor immune system) to that which plagued overworked city dwellers of the 18th century who were moved away from their natural ecosystem in villages and farms into crowded polluted cities.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has recently granted a license for a bee vaccine developed by the U.S. biotech company Dalan Animal Health to immunize honey bees to the bacterium Paenibacillus larvae that weakens and kills honey bee colonies. But what the regulators and media do not discuss is the root cause (reason) for the weakened honey bees’ immune systems in the first place. After all, honey bees have passed all kinds of evolutionary selection pressures and predate humans by a long time. The oldest known fossil bee dates from 96 to 74 million years ago, way before any humans evolved so they do not need our help if we leave them alone!

The Human-Caused Plight of Honey Bees

Honey bees (Apis Mellifera), have their origins in Europe and the Middle East, where they had been long sought after for their hives, containing sweet honey. Brought over to the Americas by early colonists, Honey bees flourished on wild flowers and began to spread into the wild meadows and forests. It has been said that the sight of honey bees to American Indians meant the colonists were nearby, and that it was time for the natives to move West.

Many modifications were made to the early “log” beehives since the 1800s. New box-frame hives, developed over the past century and a half, have allowed beekeeping to become a simple task when compared to the 19th century. The so-called "Langstroth" hives (vertically modular beehive boxes with hung frames) allow beekeepers to inspect, treat, and harvest honey easily.

Today, primarily through the assistance of man, bee colonies are estimated to number more than 2.5-3 million in the U.S. But if you think honey bees are mainly used for honey production for humans, you might be surprised to find out that hundreds of thousands of colonies are “rented” out by beekeepers to factory farms and monocultures of large (single) crops that naturally suffer from lack of natural biological diversity and therefore, scarcity of wild (natural) pollinators. Through exploiting the stunning capacity of honey bees to pollinate, the honey bee rental business has become a major profitable industry. Without adequate pollination, many (large-scale, chemically treated) factory farms and monocultures would experience drastic drops in crop yield and profitability.

Shipped from around the country, state to state, West to East, North to South, honey bee colonies are "imported" and traded (read exploited) wherever they are needed, with beekeepers that rent their colonies out making a good chunk of cash. But honey bees, like other organisms (except humans, or Homo economicus as I call them in my other blog publication), are not meant to be forced to artificially travel (on trucks) to outside their local ecosystem. Because the shipping and relocation process exposes the bees to high stresses of artificial trucking, new (non-native) ecosystems and climates, chemicals used to treat the crops, and disease transmission, the practice of renting bee colonies severely damages their health and might even jeopardize the survival of the entire colony or species. This is a topic not discussed often in the mass media or by bee enthusiasts.

A prominent and alarming example of this is the plight of rental bees in Southwest United States for the benefit of heavily sprayed almond groves and other monoculture crops in that area where honey bees are needed to ensure high crop yields because most wild and naturally diverse pollinators have been destroyed and eliminated through the heavy use of chemicals. Being highly vulnerable to fungi and disease, Non-organic almonds are one of the most fumigated and pesticide-laden crops in the world. 

These fungicides and pesticides accumulate in the bees’ food: honey and pollen. In turn, these chemicals weaken their immune system through repeated accumulation, and can kill entire colonies. The brood of the bees (the babies/young), are fed these foods that contain accumulated chemicals, and can also be severely impacted. Remember this the next time you buy the now-popular almond milk (the non-organic type) sold in stores.

In my next blog, I will discuss how we can tell if the honey you buy is of low or high quality. Stay Tuned!

Also, in my book I discuss interesting facts about bees and what we have in common with them and how they communicate.

I did not have the support of Big House publishers so as an independent scientist/author, I feel proud when I receive great reviews by independent readers like you. The following is an introduction to the book on Amazon, ranked as Hot New Release:

Why do humans walk a tightrope between depression and addiction (habituation), anxiety and recklessness? Why is it so hard to kick bad habits? Who do several countries now have Ministries of Loneliness to keep the social fabrics from falling apart? Why are humans so prone to self-delusion, self-deception, and forming mobs and cults?

Most of us know more about sports, politics, games, apps, and our jobs than about how our own brain and body work or get burned out together. For less than the cost of a family dinner, this is one of the few books in the market that can help us understand in simple language the complex nature of body-brain feedback loops as the common denominator of disorders and diseases (such as diabetes, depression, hypertension, weight gain, dementia, sleep disorders, constipation, infertility), and discords (fights, divorces, lawsuits, riots, wars). The author has spent two years to ingeniously draw from the latest discoveries in a wide range of disciplines: Neuroscience, evolution, biochemistry, psychology, economics, physics, philosophy, nutrition, and even mysticism to help us understand the cerebral root of fatigue and imbalance that plague human lives, rich and poor alike. This book is an essential simplified scientific “user manual” for our brain and body.

The world’s largest battles are fought inside human minds and today most of us suffer from abuse not by others but by our own brain. In this book, we learn about the neurochemical soup that makes our "economic" brain prone to "metabolic" imbalance and leads us to pursue unfettered growth. "The sky is the limit" thinking has constructed a world of winners, losers and barely anyone in between.

In my book and my blogs (here and on Homo economicus), I connect our biology to our psychology and brain’s neurochemistry to show why our denatured evolutionary path has led to widespread imbalances both at the individual and social levels, which we respectively call disease and injustice.