Can good gut health help bees fight off disease?

Researchers at the University of Idaho are hoping they can fend off diseases in bees through their gut microbiome instead of using antibiotics that are becoming less effective.

Like humans, bees have bacteria in their gut – about 1 billion, in fact, in an adult honey bee.

Many more of those gut bacteria carry viruses, called bacteriophages, that can be weaponized against disease.

James VanLeuven, an assistant professor at UI’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, said they’re targeting an infection called foulbrood, which is hard to root out and can devastate hives.

The challenge at the moment is the bacteriophages are picky about what they’ll attack.

“They’ll infect one strain, but not another strain. So that’s kind of the main thing we’ve been focusing on right now and we’ve been making good improvements there,” VanLeuven said.

The actual work is done using evolution, as bacteriophages can replicate themselves in roughly half an hour.

“People will breed dogs, or they improve crops. I mean, this is an age old idea of basically taking characteristics that you like and selecting them,” he said.

Some other traits VanLeuven and his team are looking for could be characteristics that make the bacteriophage more deadly to infections like foulbrood or ones that allow them to be more resilient outside a laboratory environment.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded the researchers a $300,000 grant this year to further their research.

Disease isn’t the only problem facing pollinators, like honey bees, which help grow one-third of our crops in the U.S.

Their populations are also on the decline due to pesticides and other environmental factors.