Honey Bee Medicine: A One Health Challenge

Terry Ryan Kane

A2 Bee Vet, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth to stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150?million kilometers away.

Carl Sagan

More than 120?million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth and would-be mammals were no bigger than shrews, bees flew, and pollinated flowering plants. Bees coevolved with angiosperms over 100?million years, each contributing ingredients to this cooperative arrangement. This co-evolution was so successful that bees are found on every continent of the world where flowers grow.

We have much to thank the bees for. Beyond the critical role they play in securing our food supply, bees continue to provide a variety of hive products. We harvest the honey they make from nectar, the wax they produce for comb, the pollen they collect and pack into cells for stored protein to feed their young, the propolis they collect from tree resins to line and protect their hives, and even the royal jelly, the "bee milk," to feed larvae and produce their queen. We turn these into a variety of products: candles, salves, ointments, syrups, make-up, hair products, medicines, etc.

Bees are amazing and unique. Tens of millions of forager bees may travel up to 6?km to find a food resource before flying home to their hive, communicating in the dark on vertical surfaces to their sister foragers how far away the food is, its value, and how to find it. These foragers utilize the sun's position and polarized light to determine direction with an internal clock/odometer to tell her sisters how far she flew between the food resource and the hive. Humans have almost no innate ability to measure direction and distance, as our huge investments in maps, compasses and now Global Positioning Systems attest. Bees have had this innate capability for tens of millions of years. Kart Von Frisch won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973 for his discovery of the "waggle dance" of the bee. Recent data analytics on the waggle dances have proven how accurate bee navigation really is.

One Health Issue: Planetary Health (Biodiversity and Climate Change)

The One Health concept is not new to veterinary medicine, but it is most timely now that we are facing multiple critical issues that involve our profession. Veterinary Medicine's greatest contributions to One Health have been in public health, particularly emerging zoonotic diseases, but environmental health has been largely neglected and requires our equal attention, now more than ever. Honey bees, native bees, bumble bees, and many other pollinators are the biosensors of our ecosystem health. Insects are the most diverse multicellular group of organisms on the planet - over one million species have been described, so far. And while the sheer biodiversity of insect species helps to ensure the group's survival, many of our pollinator species are in jeopardy. The decline of bees, as well as other animal pollinators, are in the public's consciousness, largely due to scientists' warning and media attention. Our ecosystems are out of balance. Habitat loss, pests and pesticide use, emerging diseases, and the extremes of global climate change all contribute to the instabilities we are experiencing. Veterinarians are trained problem solvers, but first we must recognize the problem. It is time our profession acknowledges and works to mitigate the challenges that climate change is having on animals and plant life, on agriculture, on zoonotic diseases, and on our environment. Mother Nature is relentlessly forcing us to face the threats of climate change and we must pursue all efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.

One Health Issue: Food Security

Honey bee and pollinator health is crucial to our food supply. The pollination of flowering plants is an essential ecosystem service that produces the variety of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds which, in turn, provide the necessary nutrients to sustain us, wildlife, and farm animals. The pollination services of birds, bats, butterflies, beetles, moths, ants, wasps, and the like, are vital to food systems - and to life itself. Without this variety of pollinators, we would not have the plant biodiversity that wildlife requires, or healthy soil and air. Without those things, we can never achieve global food security.

The public is increasingly aware that pollinators and honey bees are in trouble and people want to help. Hobbyist or "backyarder" and sideliner beekeeping has never been more popular, and veterinarians will be called upon more and more as we educate ourselves and the beekeepers learn our worth.

It is estimated that by 2050 there may be 9.8?billion people on earth and that global agriculture may need to increase by 30-70% in some areas. How will we feed a future population of 10?billion people? How will land and water resources be shared? How will we mitigate the increasing impact of global climate change on agriculture? Veterinarians will play an essential role in solving these issues. Food safety, food security, and public health are part of our jobs as veterinarians.

The honey bee is our top managed pollinator because it is the only bee that forms large colonies that can be transported in hive boxes. North America has the second largest commercial bee industry in the world. Today, millions of hives, the majority of the North American bee herd, are transported thousands of miles by truckloads around the United States and Canada to pollinate our food crops. The commercial beekeeper's life is a hard one - very labor intensive and with the new regulations, the spread of disease, increased fuel and transportation costs, and labor shortages, we are obliged to familiarize ourselves with their trade. Pollination services are a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Honey bees get the most "buzz" but actually some native bees are more efficient pollinators for some plants. Yes, honey bees are now considered livestock because we consume their products, but as far as getting pollen from one flower to another, honey bees are only one of a myriad of players. Native bees do not live in hives or colonies but in underground burrows. They come in all sizes and colors, and can be fuzzy, shiny, or metallic. They aren't as tidy, they don't pack pollen in little pouches, and they are messy. Farmers and producers have noted that when native bees are co-pollinating with the honey bees, production is even better. New management in Integrated Crop Pollination uses a combination of native bees and honey bees with farm practice tools, like no-till and cover crops, to increase production.

One Health Issue: The Global Epidemic of Antimicrobial Resistance

There is no doubt that antibiotic use improved the health of people and animals over the last 70?years. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is nothing new, it occurs in nature. Resistant genes are carried on plasmids (pieces of DNA) that are transferred between organisms. We now know that bacteria containing resistant genes can be transferred from livestock to humans via food. However, the misuse/overuse of antibiotics has led to the spread of resistant genes in medically important antibiotics and we now have diseases that are resistant to treatment. Multi-drug resistant bacteria are a threat to global health.

While in much of the world veterinarians have had a decades' long interaction with apiarists, veterinarians in the United States officially joined the honey bee's medical team as a result of the implementation of the 2017 US Food and Drug Administration regulations on the use of medically important antibiotics in livestock. Honey bees were officially defined as food-producing livestock in those regulations, putting their medical care into the hands of veterinarians. Writing Veterinary Feed Directives and prescriptions, however, should not be our profession's sole offering to honey bee medicine. Our expertise in herd health management will be an asset to the honey bee industry.

Antibiotic resistance has been documented in honey bees and we now know that there can be harmful effects on the honey bee microbiome. There is an increased effort to breed honey bees for hygienic behaviors to develop and enhance natural resistance.

Our Challenge

Just as you don't have to own pigs to be a swine veterinarian, you don't have to be a beekeeper to treat bee colonies. But you do have to know the biology, physiology, and behavior of these magnificent animals in order to forge a Veterinary Client Patient Relationship (VCPR) and feel confident in your handling, diagnosis, and treatment of this species, Apis mellifera, new to our profession.

All the authors in this book recommend experience beyond "book learning" - so join a local bee club, help a beekeeper in the field, or start a few hives of your own.

Learn about the types of beekeepers you may be working with; backyard hobbyists with a few hives, sideliners (whose apiary is a secondary source of income) and commercial beekeepers with many hundreds, or thousands, of hives. Sideliners are nothing new to veterinary medicine as most of our cow-calf and small ruminant clients have another primary source of...