Scientists create a vaccine against bees to fight "the apocalypse of insects"

HELSINKI: Finnish scientists have come up with what they consider to be the first vaccine in the world to protect bees against disease, which gives hope for a reduction in the number of insects that could cause a global food crisis. .

Bees play a vital role in global food production because they help fertilize three of the world's four crops by transferring pollen from male flowers to female flowers.

But in recent years, bee populations around the world are dying of "colony collapse disorder", a mysterious plague attributed to mites, pesticides, viruses, fungi, or to a combination of these factors.

A study conducted by the UN in 2016 found that more than 40% of invertebrate pollinators, especially bees and butterflies, are on the brink of extinction.

The study also revealed that 16.5% of vertebrate pollinators, such as birds and bats, are at risk.

Scientists warn that this death will lead to higher food prices and a risk of scarcity.

Medical breakthrough

The vaccine, developed by a team from the University of Helsinki in Finland, works by offering bees resistance to the fight against serious microbial diseases that can be fatal for pollinator communities.

"If we can save even a small part of the bee population with this invention, I think we have accomplished our good deed and saved the world a bit," said chief researcher Dalial Freitak.

"Even a two to three percent increase in the population of bees would be huge," she told AFP.

Vaccination against insects was previously considered impossible because creatures did not have antibodies, one of the key mechanisms used by humans and other animals to fight diseases.

However, a breakthrough came in 2014 when Freitak, specialist in insects and immunology, noticed that butterflies fed with certain bacteria could actually transmit immunity to their offspring.

"They could actually give something by eating, I just did not know what the mechanism was," Freitak said.

"I met Heli Salmela, who was working on bees and a protein called vitellogenin." I heard her speak and I thought to myself: "OK, I could bet that it's a good thing. is your protein that transmits my signal from one generation to the next. "

The pair began collaborating and created a vaccine against American foulbrood, the most widespread and destructive bacterial bee disease in the world.

The treatment is administered to the queen bee via a piece of sugar, in the same way that many children receive the polio vaccine. The queen then transmits immunity to her offspring, spreading her through the bee community.

In addition to working on vaccines against other diseases, the team also began trying to raise funds to make the vaccine commercially available, with "very positive" returns up to present, according to Freitak.

"The regulatory hurdles are many, four to five years before arriving on the market, it is an optimistic estimate," she said.

CROP GROWTH AFFECTED

Diseases are thought to be just one of the many causes of pollinator loss, alongside pesticides and intensive agriculture, which reduces the diversity of insect nutrition.

But the team believes that protecting bee populations from disease will make them stronger and therefore more resilient to other threats.

The European Union and Canada have voted in favor of banning neonicotinoid insecticides after studies have shown that chemicals are harming the reproductive capacity of bees.

Research supported by the United Nations in 2016 estimated that a value of 577 billion USD (511 billion EUR) of food produced each year depended directly on pollinators.

According to this study, the volume of pollinator-dependent food produced has increased by 300% over the last 50 years.

While the number of pollinators has decreased, some farmers have turned to bee renting or manual pollination – as for fruit trees in parts of China – to replace the processes that nature previously provided for free .

In Helsinki, the project was externally funded, but the team has now acquired a safer position at the University of Graz in Austria, where new research on immunizations will begin early next year.

Graz is also the former seat of renowned zoologist Karl von Frisch, who discovered the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973, discovering that honey bees communicated by performing the eight-part "waggle movement dance".