A new specialty takes flight at UGA VetMed

It’s axiomatic in nature, that what is good for the honeybee is good for mankind. Dr. Joerg Mayer and his students are proving this truth with the bee medicine program at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine.

The apiary at UGA VetMed was an early proving ground for the world’s first vaccine against American foulbrood disease in honeybees and is now a laboratory for research into the effectiveness of apitherapy, which uses bee products such as honey and venom to prevent and treat illnesses including cancer.

The effort found a generous benefactor in the late Dr. Melissa Newberry-Kling (DVM 1983), who made a generous gift to establish the first endowed Apitherapy Fund in memory of her father, Dr. J. Malcolm Kling, shortly before her death in 2024.

Her father, a dedicated educator in both veterinary and human medicine, valued education and compassionate care. Inspired by his passion, Newberry-Kling sought to name a meaningful part of the program in his honor.

The genesis of a new specialty

Mayer began incorporating his backyard hobby into his profession on the Zoological Medicine Service at the VTH after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned over-the-counter sales of antimicrobial drugs, including some antibiotics, in 2017.

“It became very obvious to me that this was going to become a future problem, so I developed the curriculum here,” Mayer said.

Before that, beekeepers could walk into any feed supply store and buy antibiotics to sprinkle into their hives when they suspected an outbreak of bacterial disease. “Now the FDA has said that’s no longer a possibility and if you want to treat your honeybees with an antibiotic you need to go to your veterinarian and get a veterinary feed directive (or a prescription),” Mayer explains.

Because bee medicine is such a new specialty, many veterinarians are reluctant to prescribe for them. “I think all my students finishing this rotation would feel extremely confident and comfortable doing that, so it takes that awkwardness out of the equation.”

Students start learning how to treat bees during their first year of vet school through the UGA Honeybee Vet Club. In year four they can sign up for the three-week honeybee rotation and receive a certificate in Apiary Health.

Novel Idea: A vaccine for bees

At the same time Mayer was introducing the teaching hives into the VTH curriculum, Dr. Annette Kleiser was working to bring a promising vaccine against American foulbrood disease out of the research lab at the University of Helsinki in Finland and into the marketplace. Kleiser previously worked with universities to translate promising research ideas into real-world products.

“Typically you see the same innovation over and over, you know, little advancements that are important, nothing that is completely different and novel,” she says. Until the University of Helsinki came calling with this idea for a bee vaccine.

“I was just blown away,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Somebody has to do this.’ We all know it’s a big problem. Bees are dying and while there are many (reasons) why they’re dying disease is a major factor. They are livestock and we depend on them and we’re not going to address pesticides or monocultures any time soon – those are policy decisions – but we know vaccines work and this research has shown it seems to work in bees.”

A new chapter in veterinary medicine

The development of the world’s first bee vaccine made news repeatedly in recent years. The USDA granted provisional approval of the vaccine in January 2023. Much like the FDA’s emergency approval of the COVID vaccine during the height of the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, this approval allowed Dalan to manufacture and distribute the vaccine to commercial beekeepers while it was still going through final approval.

In October 2023, the company received similar conditional approval from the Canadian government to market the vaccine to beekeepers there. Today the company is marketing the vaccine to commercial and hobbyist beekeepers throughout North America.

There is no other treatment for American foulbrood disease available. A bacterial disease that is highly transmissible in the wild, American foulbrood targets the larvae of a hive. There is no cure; the entire hive must be burned and buried when infected, per USDA regulations. The spores that cause the disease can remain viable in the environment for up to 40 years.