{"id":1132,"date":"2026-04-01T10:45:43","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T17:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/?page_id=1132"},"modified":"2026-04-01T10:45:43","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T17:45:43","slug":"webinar-veterinary-feed-directive-and-honey-bee-diseases","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/extension\/webinar-veterinary-feed-directive-and-honey-bee-diseases\/","title":{"rendered":"Webinar: Veterinary Feed Directive and Honey Bee Diseases"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Veterinary Feed Directive and Honey Bee Diseases\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/snO97QIyeXE?start=1031&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><br><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Text Transcript with Description of Visuals<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table class=\"has-fixed-layout\"><thead><tr><th>Audio<\/th><th>Visual<\/th><\/tr><\/thead><tbody><tr><td>All right, let&#8217;s get started. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our second webinar of our 2026 webinar series. I&#8217;m Bri Price. I&#8217;m the WSU Bee program extension coordinator. We have two more webinars happening this year for more information about those and to register, please visit our upcoming events page on our website, bees.wsu.edu. I just have a couple of announcements, and then I will introduce our speaker.<br><br>The WSU honey bees and pollinators program is a cornerstone of the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences, abbreviated CAHNRS, that is dedicated to fostering resilient ecosystems in Washington and beyond. Our mission intertwines innovative research, community engagement and education to safeguard pollinators that are pivotal to our food security and environmental health. In partnership with the Conner&#8217;s Resilient Washington initiative. We&#8217;re committed to advancing sustainable practices and pollinator friendly landscapes, and ensuring a flourishing future for agriculture and natural resources.<br><br>There will be time to answer any questions you have after the presentation today. Feel free to type questions into the Q&amp;A box below anytime during the presentation. After the event and before you close your browser, you should be prompted for a short five-question survey. This will help us understand our impact for today. Today&#8217;s speaker is Mckaela Hobday. Mckaela is a doctoral student in the Department of Entomology at Washington State University. She is studying under the direction of Dr. Priya Basu. With a lifelong passion for beekeeping, Michaela&#8217;s research interests are broad, with a primary focus on understanding and mitigating stressors that impact honeybee health. Her doctoral research is centered around investigating the epidemiology of European foulbrood to mitigate disease and benefit stakeholders. In this webinar, Mckaela will be discussing her research on EFB and sharing information on the Veterinary Feed Directives to increase awareness for both beekeepers and veterinarians about antibiotics and honeybees. Okay, Mckaela you can go ahead and share your screen and I will hide my video.<\/td><td>Woman in red shirt on screen wearing glasses and a Washington State University Logo in the background.<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>All right, fantastic. So the first thing that I wanted to do whenever I started this web or when I as I&#8217;m starting this webinar is talk a little bit about my background. I&#8217;m here today to teach all of you, but what do I know?<\/td><td>Title slide reads: Veterinary feed directives and honey bee disease, Emphasizing European foulbrood. Mckaela Hobday<br>Mckaela.hobday@wsu.edu<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So I&#8217;ve been researching honeybees for almost 6 years now, and that actually began at Texas A&amp;M University. I was working in Dr. Juliano Rangel&#8217;s lab alongside graduate students. I was working on a doctoral students research project with her, where we went into the welder Wildlife Refuge in South Texas, and studied. This feral population of honeybees. This was an awesome project. It got me really into disease ecology of honeybees, and I had so much fun. If you look at this image in the right bottom corner, when that one was taken, basically we were climbing these trees to work with these Africanized feral bees. And my veil came open when I was climbing that tree, so naturally, I got at least 11 bee stings in my face. Um, that was a really great experience that just got me hooked on research, and I have been with the honeybees ever since. <\/td><td>Photo collage of<br>woman wearing a white bee suit, holding an insect collection net<br>Woman wearing a pink bee suit sitting on a truck<br>person wearing a mask and a bee suit next to a bee hive<br>Three people wearing bee suits standing in a field<br>Incubator holding queen rearing equipment<br>Apiary<br>Person collecting bees from a tree<br>Person in a pink lab coat looking into a microscope<br>Person climbing a tree<br>Woman with swollen face<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So, while I was at A&amp;M, I also had the opportunity to do a research experience for undergraduate students at North Carolina State University under the direction of Dr. David Tarpy. So I was working on a project in a lab that did a lot of work with microbials, and the project I was working on here was to better understand the impacts of yeast, different species of yeast in floral diet preference for pollinators. So I often had to smell some funny plates in the lab and describe scents of what the pollinators are experiencing.<\/td><td>Photo collage of<br>Person holding a honey bee frame<br>Person holding an insect collection net<br>Person holding a cell culture plate<br>Plants in a field<br>Person in a field<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Then, after I earned my bachelor&#8217;s degree from Texas A&amp;M University, I earned my degree in entomology. I went on and worked for Texas A&amp;M AgriLife Research Extension for a bit, where I did field crop entomology work. If you look at this bottom right image, this is my favorite one or favorite photo to show people from the summer. That is an active aphid infestation on a sorghum leaf. So I got to know insects more than just what I learned in the classroom and gained a much better picture of field crop entomology, but decided I&#8217;m set on honeybees. It&#8217;s what I want to do forever. And that&#8217;s when I met Dr. Priya Chakrabarti Basu. <\/td><td>Photo collage of<br>Three people standing in front of cabinets<br>Leaf footed bugs on a mesh bag covering sorghum<br>Person standing next to a tractor<br>Person in a corn field<br>Aphid infestation on sorghum leaf<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So I came on from my bachelor&#8217;s degree straight into my PhD at Mississippi State University with Priya, where we did some incredible outreach. I also learned some incredible lab techniques. I got really comfortable with honeybee research independently. I got used to the horticulture side of honeybees.<\/td><td>Photo collage of <br>Group of beekeepers standing aroung a colony<br>Group of lab members posing for a photos<br>Two people in a business standing with an observation hive<br>Group of beekeepers posing for a photo<br>Two people teaching firefighters<br>Group of lab members posing for a photo<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>I really fell in love with research here at the graduate level, but then Priya took a position with Washington State University, and it was the easiest decision in the world to masters out at Mississippi State and move up to Washington with her to continue my PhD. With that, I probably should have had a Washington State University slide. I&#8217;ve been here for a year now, and I am absolutely in love with research. It&#8217;s been a big transition to go from Mississippi to Washington, especially because I am from Texas originally. But, I am having the greatest time doing research, and I&#8217;m gonna talk a little bit first about veterinary feed directives, diseases of honeybees, and then I&#8217;ll go into the research that I&#8217;m actually doing here in Washington.<\/td><td>Photo collage of <br>Person sitting over table holding tweezers, counting honey bees<br>Honey bees in a petri dish with person holding tweezers<br>Petri dish with honey bee guts dissected out<br>Person in a bee suit in front of a colony<br>Person standing in a greenhouse with potted plants<br>Bumble bee colony<br>Person holding honey bee colony frame<br>Person sitting over a tub with a clicker counting bees<br>Person sitting at a table with samples in microcentrifuge tubes<br>Honey bees in a hardware cloth cage<br>Person with a plastic bucket containing bees<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So, the first thing that I want to show you, we&#8217;ve all seen healthy honeybee colonies before, and whenever we&#8217;re talking about healthy colonies, this is what I want to see, especially as someone who researches brood diseases. We see an even capped brood pattern. There&#8217;s a few empty spots, but we&#8217;re really not concerned about that. We see pearly white larvae that looks moist and well-fed, and this is just a really beautiful colony that we&#8217;re seeing.<\/td><td>Title: Healthy Colony <br>Photos of Honey bee colony frames with capped and uncapped brood<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Then, whenever it comes to diseases, on the other hand, I&#8217;m about to show you a few photos of different honeybee diseases, and I want you to think to yourself, what is this disease? So in this first image, we see the ropey brood. This is indicative of, I&#8217;m sure you all know it, American foulbrood. <br>Then for this one, this is a bit of a more complicated disease. We see chewed-out brood or chewed out pupae and a spotty brood pattern as well. This is parasitic mite syndrome, and I&#8217;ll talk a little bit more about these diseases in a moment.<br>Here we have what looks like a leathery pupa brood. It looks like a leather leathery larva within a cell. And this is really indicative of sack brood virus. And then last, of course, I have to show you what European foulbrood looks like in a colony. So, in EFB, we see visible tracheal mites, it&#8217;s discolored larvae. I&#8217;ll talk a little bit more about the symptoms in a few minutes.<\/td><td>Title: Can you identify this disease? <br>Four photos of various honey bee diseases<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So, European foulbrood can be difficult to identify, and the three diseases that I just showed you pictures of are what I think are the most easy to confuse European foulbrood with. European foulbrood is caused by the bacteria Melissococcus plutonius. Then we have American foulbrood, which is caused by a spore-forming bacteria, which is why it&#8217;s so problematic, and that&#8217;s Paenibacillus larvae. Then we have sacbrood virus, which is transmitted by Varroa, and then there&#8217;s parasitic mite syndrome, which is a disease complex. That means we don&#8217;t quite understand everything going on there, but we know that this syndrome is due to Varroa infestations. <\/td><td>Title: European foulbrood can be difficult to identify. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. Four photos of different honey bee disease infections<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So for sacrood virus, whenever we&#8217;re talking about this virus, and we&#8217;re hoping to identify it with our colony, we&#8217;ll often see yellow to black larvae. We&#8217;ll see perforated cappings, we&#8217;ll see leathery brood. They may have a scale, and I&#8217;ll show you a photo of a scale in just a minute. Um, and it may be easy to remove if there is one. There should be no associated odor, and this is a disease that you often see in the spring to summer because of its association with Varroa.<\/td><td>Title: Sacbrood virus. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text.<br>Photo of single larvae on a table and single larvae being held by forceps<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Then there&#8217;s parasitic mite syndrome. And again, this is mid to late summer. There may or may not be an odor within this complex disease. There will be no scale. What I think is the most telling indicator of this disease is the hairless bees. Because you won&#8217;t see that in any of the other ones that I&#8217;ve already mentioned. You might see sunken brood cappings, like in this top right image, right under that photo credit, you can kind of see that sunken cap right there. And then you will see a high visible mite presence.<\/td><td>Title: Parasitic Mite Syndrome. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. Photos of Varroa mite and honey bee frames with Parasitic mite syndrome<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Then there&#8217;s American foulbrood, which may have perforated or sunken cappings. There may be sweaty cappings. What I think the most telling indicator of your American foul brood is is the positive rope test. So basically, if you take a Q-tip or something, sorry, toothpick or something similar. You mix it up in a cell and pull. If it ropes, there&#8217;s a very, very good chance that you have American foulbrood. Other symptoms that you might see are yellow to brown or miscolored larvae. You might see the tongue of pupa stuck out, sometimes stuck to the bottom of a cell. There will be a scale and it will not be easy to remove. And I&#8217;ll again show you what a scale on the next slide. Um, there&#8217;s sometimes a smell. People say American foulbrood is associated with a pungent trash can odor, and then there are antibiotics like Tylacin and lincomycin that can treat this. However, you need to look at your state&#8217;s regulations. In Washington, you do not legally have to burn your colonies. In some states you do. I always recommend burning your colonies because, like I said, this is a spore forming bacteria, so if it&#8217;s on your hive equipment, if it&#8217;s on your tools, if it&#8217;s on your bees that are out foraging, it&#8217;s a very highly transmittable. So this is just the worst. You often or I highly recommend just burning everything or reaching out to your state agencies to determine what the best steps are.<\/td><td>Title: American foulbrood (AFB). Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. Photos of American foulbrood infected honey bee colony frame with a positive rope test. Graphic of flames at bottom of  slide appears<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>For European fell brood, this is typically associated as a springtime disease. However, I have seen this disease in Mississippi when it&#8217;s 115 degrees outside. You&#8217;ll notice this disease on open brood. They may be yellow or brown or miscolored. You might see the trachea, which are the breathing tubes of these larvae. And then there will be a scale that is easy to remove. And this is what that scale looks like. So in the bottom of the cell, the larvae will basically dry down, and you&#8217;ll be able to pop this out. And then it fails the rope test. So this is the big visible difference between American foulbrood and European foulbrood. <\/td><td>Title: European foulbrood (EFB). Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. Photos of Honey bee colony frame infected by European foulbrood Scale formed by European foulbrood held by tweezers<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>In order to confirm infection, specifically determining whether your colony has European foul brood or American foul brood, there are commercially available lateral flow tests that you can purchase online or possibly from local beekeeping stores. Otherwise, it will have to be diagnosed in laboratories. Um, I know that the USDA lab in Beltsville, Maryland does accept samples for diagnosis. On this QR code here, I&#8217;ll give everyone just a second to scan it. If you&#8217;re interested, or it&#8217;s really easy to Google. You can check out the USDA Beltsville Maryland Lab website. They have tons of information about sending and receiving samples and what they&#8217;ll do with them and who they&#8217;ll test samples for. And they really are great about looking at diseases.<\/td><td>Title: Confirming infection. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. QR code linking to USDA Beltsville lab<br>Arrow pointing to QR code<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>That being said, if European foulbrood intervention is needed within your colonies or American foulbrood for that matter, often this is a disease that will go away on its own, but in some severe cases, it will not. In some systems or cropping systems, this disease is really rampant, it&#8217;s really problematic, and you might need treatment. So you&#8217;ll want to be sure, um, non-antibiotic treatment. You can remove infected frames, take them out. I would suggest storing them in a freezer or burning them, or just getting rid of them. Um, and that&#8217;s for EFB or AFB. It&#8217;s also beneficial to maintain strong populations, but that&#8217;s a dream for everyone, right? You also want to manage for Varroa because European foulbrood is considered to be a stress disease. So if you have tons of stress within your bees, like Varroa being present. They may be more likely to have other diseases. Uh, potentially, if you re-queen, you can break this disease cycle, because this is a brood disease, so having a brood break can be beneficial. Additionally, some queens are maybe less hygienic than others, and it might just be beneficial to requeen. I would recommend, though, before antibiotic intervention, um, before you do tons\u2026 spend tons of hours trying to fix this EFB problem. I would suggest that the first thing you try to do is make sure that the nutritional needs of your colonies are met, because what Priya always says, and what I always say, we believe that nutrition is the first line of defense for honeybees.<br>It&#8217;s like for humans, if I&#8217;m really sick and I&#8217;m not sleeping enough, and I&#8217;m also not eating well, I&#8217;m not going to get better. There&#8217;s all of these things at play making me sicker, but poor nutrition, if I&#8217;m not eating soup when I&#8217;m sick, I might just get sicker and sicker. <\/td><td>Title: If EFB intervention is needed:. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. Photo of oxytetracycline bottle<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So, like humans for honeybees, we need all of the major macro and micronutrients for honeybees, they&#8217;re getting these through nectar and honey and pollen, and where nectar and pollen primarily, and then they also need. phytochemicals, minerals, phytosterols, and vitamins, and these are all mostly obtained from pollen. However, they can also receive some of these critical nutrients in water. So, just like humans, they&#8217;re needing carbs and lipids and proteins. <\/td><td>Title: Nutrients. Graphics of hexagon clusters of major macro and micro-nutrients needed by honey bees<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>There are major nutritional challenges for all pollinators. First, we have the lack of pollen abundance. There might not be enough pollen in the landscape. Then there might be a lack of pollen diversity. If you&#8217;re pollinating with your bees on a monocropping system, they may not have enough floral resources nearby to have a well-balanced diet. There&#8217;s also a lack of pollen quality. I actually research European foulbrood through the blueberry pollination system, specifically due to the fact that blueberry pollen, we know is nutritionally poor. And then last, if there&#8217;s not enough nectar within the flowers that are available in the landscape, that&#8217;s also a major nutritional challenge.<\/td><td>Title: Major Nutritional Challenges. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. Photo collage of bees pollinating flowers.<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So, in many cases, mitigating stressors, like allowing for good nutrition, optimal nutrition, that might be able to mitigate the disease. But in other cases, your colonies might need antibiotics.<\/td><td>Text: In many cases, mitigating stressors can mitigate disease.<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So the first thing that&#8217;s really important to know is that when antibiotic intervention is needed, you&#8217;re going to have to work with a veterinarian. And the first thing that a vet is going to do when you tell them that your colony is sick with a disease is they&#8217;re going to want to see your inspection records. So, they&#8217;re gonna wanna know how long the colony&#8217;s been sick, what the impacts are, all of the symptoms that are going on within a colony. And so, if you keep really good records of your colonies, you&#8217;re setting yourself up for success to receive faster treatment. <\/td><td>Title: What if my colony needs antibiotics? Photo of beehive inspection checklist<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So, as of 2017, the Food and Drug Administration requires a veterinarian to prescribe antibiotics for honeybees, and a veterinary feed directive is similar to a prescription for humans. So, honeybees are the only insect listed as a food-producing animal by the FDA because they&#8217;re producing honey. Antibiotics are labeled for the use of honeybees or in honeybee colonies for the control of American foulbrood or the treatment of European foulbrood. And this is just a sample of what a veterinary feed directive form might look like whenever you&#8217;re receiving antibiotic treatment.<\/td><td>Title: Veterinary Feed Directives. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. Photo of VFD prescription form<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So I have a little bit of information just on oxytetracycline or Terramycin, which is the commercial name treating this for honeybees. Whenever we&#8217;re doing this, it&#8217;s really important that we follow the label, and per the label of oxytet, you want to feed 200 milligrams per colony, and this will be done by diluting powdered sugar with the oxytetracycline, and then dusting it over the brood bars. It can also be fed via syrup as well, though, per the label. You will apply this treatment 3 times a day for 4 to 5 day intervals, and you&#8217;ll want to treat in February to March. But in Washington, for example, that might not be quite as reasonable. We might have to push it a little bit. So it&#8217;s important to know the most important thing to know is that if you are treating with antibiotics, it needs to be discontinued at least 6 weeks before the main honey flow. We do not want to see antibiotics within our honey, so if you are treating your colonies, that six-week gap is mandatory.<\/td><td>Title: Feeding Oxytetracycline (Terramycin). Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. <\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So veterinarians also, when working with veterinary feed directives, they must have a veterinary client-patient relationship. They have to engage with you as the beekeeper and assume responsibility for making these clinical judgments about hive health. However, I know I have people online right now from all sorts of different states. Your state laws may vary, so it is best to work with maybe your state apiary inspector or a veterinarian just to make sure that everything is being processed correctly. <\/td><td>Title: Issuing VFD\u2019s. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text.   Photo of VFD prescription form<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Now I&#8217;m kind of jumping ship and talking a little bit about my research. As I previously mentioned, blueberry pollen is nutritionally poor. This is a paper that came out last year with Priya and a couple of our lab members, where we were comparing different blueberry cultivars, pollen nutrition, were the primary protein and lipid content within different species, and we see that not only do different cultivars have various nutrition available, but it&#8217;s also not optimal nutrition for honeybees. <\/td><td>QR code and picture of publication titled Pollen production and nutrient composition in two northern highbush blueberry cultivars: implications for pollinator nutrition<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>However, pollinators are specialty crops, and they rely on honeybee pollination services to grow. Blueberry crops rely on honeybees for uniform fruit size, larger yield, and large fruit size as well. <\/td><td>Title: Pollinators and specialty crops. Photos of hands holding blueberries connected to plant and honey bee colonies in a blueberry field<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And as I already alluded to, honeybees are facing a multifactorial decline. We have issues like pests and parasites, genetic diversity, or a lack thereof, transportation issues, environmental stressors like climate. There&#8217;s pesticides, poor nutrition, and pathogens, and all of these issues are working together to cause bee population decline declines. I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;ve all heard the number that last year we had about a 62% colony loss, and I believe that this is attributed to all of these things working together.<\/td><td>Photo displaying a graphical representation of honey bee stressor exposure and multifactoral bee declines<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>In the blueberry pollination system, we have seen a strong relationship between blueberry pollination services and symptomatic European foulbrood following pollination. This is driving up pollination contract costs and increasing colony mortality as well. And we can see right here that we&#8217;re facing many of the same stressors. This is a large monocropping system where bees are only having\u2026 where bees only have access to blueberry pollen, which, as I said before, is nutritionally poor. It&#8217;s rainy, it&#8217;s cool, there&#8217;s poor climate conditions. And, when a pathogen is introduced into the system, like Melissococcus plutonius, the bacteria that causes European foulbrood, these bees are much more susceptible to disease. <\/td><td>Video clip of honey bee colonies in a blueberry field in rainy conditions<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So what are we going to do about it? We know that European foulbrood is a huge issue, but we don&#8217;t even quite understand why. We know that it&#8217;s stress-related, but we don&#8217;t see this issue in other fruit crops like blueberries. So Oregon State University, Dr. Ramesh Sagili is leading a massive multi-university project where we&#8217;re studying this disease. So Priya and I were the Mississippi State University counterparts to this project, and we when we moved up to Washington. We just joined the Washington team and made this project even larger. And that&#8217;s Dr. Brandon Hopkins, who&#8217;s leading it with WSU. So we&#8217;re all working together alongside UC Davis and Oregon State University to better understand this disease. <\/td><td>Photos of article stating OSU is leading a $4.2 million dollar USDA grant to study disease plagueing honey bees<br>Honey bee colonies in a blueberry field with three beekeepers<br>Honey bee colonies next to a building with a pop up tent present<br>Two beekeepers inspecting a honey bee colony with other nearby colonies<br>Colonies next to a tree line<br>Logos for wsu, osu, MS ST, UC Davis<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And the first thing that we did is a major longitudinal study where we had field evaluations, where we had 144 colonies in Mississippi. I believe the other 3 states all had closer to 300 colonies. But in Mississippi we didn&#8217;t have the blueberry acreage to support that large of a study. Within the study, half of our colonies went to the blueberry pollination system, and the other half were on a separate crop, and we were essentially taking a plethora of data, collecting adults, larvae, honey, and pollen.  And we&#8217;re investigating this disease, and I&#8217;m now processing samples for this.<\/td><td>Title: Longitudinal monitoring &#8211; Field evaluation. Video of researchers inspecting colonies<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>When we were investigating these colonies, sampling, taking data, something that we looked at was active symptomatic European fowl breed infection, and we assigned EFB scores. So an EFB score of 0 was a colony with absolutely no symptomatic EFB. An EFB score of 3 had at least 50 symptomatic larvae are infected with EFB, and an EFB score of 1 was 1 to 10 infected cells, and 2 was 11 to 50 infected cells.<\/td><td>Title: EFB Score 0, EFB Score 1, EFB Score 2, EFB Score 3,<br>Photos of<br>Healthy honey bees<br>Honey bees with mild efb infection<br>Honey bees with moderate efb infection<br>Honey bees with severe efb infection<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>We had 2 main objectives for this portion of the study. We 1st wanted to monitor active symptomatic European foulbrood infections throughout the blueberry pollination cycle over 2 years in a longitudinal study. And then we wanted to determine the effects of EFB on vitellogenin and expression.<\/td><td>Title: Objectives. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text.   <\/td><\/tr><tr><td>I hypothesize that peak symptomatic EFB outbreaks happen in colonies during wet, cool springs with fungicide exposure and poor nutrition.<\/td><td>Title: Hypothesis for objective 1. Speaker reads off slide. <br>Photos of<br>Person in apiary with a smoker<br>Two people inspecting honey bee colony<br>Person at table recording notes<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And I also hypothesized that honeybees without active EFB infection will have higher levels of vitellogenin and expression, and I might be speaking a little bit of gibberish right now, so I want to slow it down and talk about vitellogenin.<\/td><td>Title: Hypothesis for objective 2. Speaker reads off slide. <br>Photo of 96 well laboratory plate<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Vitellogenin is a gene that&#8217;s present in all insects. Typically, this gene is a yolk protein precursor, or basically it&#8217;s a gene in insects that allow them to produce eggs. But, when we look at a honeybee colony, we know that workers, ideally, are not producing any eggs. So, vitellogenin plays a different role. It&#8217;s an antimicrobial peptide producer, so whenever this gene is expressed at high levels, it is basically making all of these good things that can assist with immunity and keeping bees healthy. It&#8217;s also a nutritional marker. It aids in food production, in storage. It&#8217;s also been shown to improve overwintering strength. It plays a role in caste determinations, and then it&#8217;s also expressed differently throughout a bee&#8217;s life. So, when vitellogenin is expressed at the highest levels, these bees are probably nurses, and at the lowest levels, they&#8217;re foragers, so it decreases over time, which makes sense. Because younger bees would produce the most vitellogenin and have the best immunity, the best food production. This is what we expect and what research has shown thus far. <\/td><td>Title: Vitellogenin in honey bees. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text.   <\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So within a colony, or within our study, we had to laboratorily test vitellogenin and expression. And this involves extracting RNA, converting it to cDNA, and running real-time quantitative PCR for vitellogenin expression, and then analyzing this data. So basically, this is a lot of fancy jargon saying that we take these samples back to the lab, we do some molecular analysis, and we can actually quantify the vitellogenin expression.<\/td><td>Title: Methodology. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text.   Photo of microcentrifuge tubes displaying steps of qpcr<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So this is some really preliminary data that I&#8217;m showing you. I have slowly been working my way through the thousands of samples that we need to quantify vitellogenin in for, and so far  I&#8217;m just showing you about 60 samples that I&#8217;ve processed from Oregon State University thus far. So here is a quick graphical display of the EFB scores that we&#8217;ve sampled from, or that I&#8217;ve tested thus far. So this dark blue color is an EFB score of 0, so we had 27 samples with no symptomatic European foulbrood infection that I&#8217;ve tested this far.  Orange is an EFB score of 1. Green is an EFB score of two, and then that white-blue color is an EFB score of 3, where we see really symptomatic European foulbrood within a colony.<\/td><td>Photo of pie chart displaying the distribution of efb infection scores for processed samples<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And this data is not scientifically perfect the way I have it displayed today. So I am just trying to show you the big trend picture. That as we see an increase in symptomatic European foulbrood infection, we see a decrease in vitellogenin and expression, which is what we hope to see. We hope to see that colonies with the highest vitellogenin expression. Um, we want to see that they&#8217;re healthy, that they&#8217;re not symptomatically infected at that point. And note that I keep using the word symptomatic. Another lab is working on molecularly testing infection within all of these colonies, but this is a huge project. We have tens of thousands of samples, and we may not be able to see the effects of actual practical infections and compare it to this vitellogenin expression until all of these samples are processed. So, for right now, we have to go with what we see, and we have seen a plethora of infections, so we&#8217;re going to trust that as we&#8217;re going through this data.<\/td><td>Photo of bar graph showing efb scores and vitellogenin expression<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So the preliminary data does suggest merit in our hypotheses. But again, we have thousands of samples to evaluate prior to drawing conclusions. <\/td><td>Title: Discussion. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. <br>Photos of<br>Honey bee colonies on palets<br>Two people inspecting a colony<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>I do have some other objectives for the study. I first want to look at the nutritional quality of pollen forage during the study. So, as I mentioned, all of the universities collected pollen as we were sampling throughout the study. You can see those yellow pollen traps on the colonies in this image. And I&#8217;m essentially nutritionally quantifying the protein and lipid ratios within this sample collected pollen. and determining what nutrition was available for the bees, and if they were foraging on crops other than blueberries, because a couple of studies have shown that in the blueberry pollination system, honeybees are primarily going to blueberry flowers for nectar. However, they&#8217;re basically accidentally pollinating within this or this effort. <br>The next big thing that I&#8217;m really interested in doing is examining infection at the larval level, because we know that this disease is an issue, but again, we don&#8217;t exactly know why. And so we have this massive colony-level study, but that doesn&#8217;t tell us what is going on in controlled laboratory conditions.<\/td><td>Title: Next objectives. Speaker reads off bulleted list of text. Photo of five people inspecting colonies in a blueberry field<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So, I have several main objectives in testing epidemiology and larvae. Um, I&#8217;m working alongside researchers at the University of Idaho, because I personally am not a microbiologist. I will never claim to be a microbiologist until I can, so I&#8217;m relying on microbiologists to culture European foulbrood with me. This disease is incredibly difficult to culture. It takes a lot of time, and most researchers cannot do it. So I&#8217;m really lucky to have a really great team behind me. Dr. Megan Milbrath in Michigan, she is a fantastic scientist. Her lab is one of the few that can culture this bacteria, and they have been so gracious to send the U of I several different strains of European foulbrood that they&#8217;ve collected within the field. So from the ones that we have, we first wanted to identify the most virulent or infectious strains of European foulbrood. We next, or this year what we&#8217;re going to do is identify the bacterial load for symptomatic infections. We&#8217;ll identify the most susceptible larval age, and then examine the interactions between different stressors and European foulbrood. <\/td><td>Title: Testing EFB epidemiology in the larvae. Photos of 48 well plate containing larvae and four study objectives listed<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So the first thing that we had to do within the study is actually learn how to rear larvae. And again, I have an incredible team of researchers I&#8217;m working with. I could not learn how to do this alone. This is a really difficult task as well to culture or grow larvae within the lab, you need to keep them in really controlled conditions. They have really specialized diets that you have to mix up for them, and then even so, it&#8217;s really easy to kill them. So, in this image on the right, you see one of the first attempts I did at rearing larvae, and we can even see a couple of black dead larvae in there. That could be due to a variety of reasons. Maybe the larvae was cold, or maybe it was drowned in its own food. Maybe I stabbed it whenever I grafted it into the plate. There&#8217;s a wide variety of reasons as to why our larvae can die within these studies, so it&#8217;s really important to get very consistent with grafting and feeding. <\/td><td>Title: Learning to rear larvae. Videos of<br>Scientists practicing larval rearing grafting, and completed plates<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So when looking at the virulent strains of European foulbrood, we know that there is something called typical strains and atypical strains of European foulbrood. And it&#8217;s said that the atypical strains are much more infectious or problematic than the typical strains right now. But again, there is not a lot of literature on EFB because this disease is so hard for scientists to work with. It doesn&#8217;t want to culture right. It doesn&#8217;t want to stay alive. Within our colonies, for some reason, it&#8217;s fantastic. It&#8217;ll run rampant on its own. But in controlled conditions, it just does not want to cooperate.<br><\/td><td>Title: Identify the most virulent strain of EFB. Photos of scientist working in anaerobic chamber<br>Photo inside chamber of petri dishes<br>Person in a lab coat woking at a bench<br>Falcon tubes<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So within this 1st objective, we had these grafting plates, and we, on several different replicates, essentially fed the larvae different strains of European foulbrood through their feed. <\/td><td>Title: Identify the most virulent strain of EFB. Photo of 48 well plates containing larvae<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>This is a little data heavy, but it&#8217;s just to show if you look at these numbers on the very right, we fed them pretty similar amounts, or cell counts of Melissococcus plutonius, which is the bacteria that causes EFB, again. And it&#8217;s really difficult to culture things and get them all to the exact same level. So we just have to call this similar enough that it&#8217;s scientifically relevant. <\/td><td>Photos of larvae in 48 well plate and cell counts of each strain fed to larvae<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>What we did see, however, is that the atypical strains did cause much greater mortality or infection than the typical strains. <\/td><td>Graph displaying mortality relative to strain<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So, going back to our objectives for the study, the next thing that we&#8217;re interested in doing is identifying the bacterial load for symptomatic infection. <\/td><td>Photos of 48 well plate containing larvae and four study objectives listed. Speaker reads objectives. <\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Within literature, we don&#8217;t know how many cells of European foulbrood it takes to infect a larvae. With Paenibacillus larvae, where American foulbrood, some papers state that just a few different spores of this bacteria will cause a larvae to get infected. But in EFB, there is no such literature. I&#8217;ve seen several papers state that they&#8217;re feeding colonies, like, 10^6 cells, and we did 10^7, that&#8217;s a huge amount of bacteria that they&#8217;re exposed to. So we&#8217;re interested in basically comparing different infections of or different doses of European fowl brood on the larvae to determine which is the most infectious without immediately killing them.<\/td><td>Title: Plans for the next objectives (Spring 2026). Photo of 48 well plates containing larvae<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>The next thing that we&#8217;re interested in doing is identifying the most susceptible larval age. I personally, whenever I see European foulbrood, often I&#8217;ll notice it on older larvae, and that might just be because older larvae are easier to see than the younger larvae, or maybe the younger larvae are being removed hygienically. So I&#8217;m very interested in seeing which instar is the most likely to get infected by European foulbrood when they&#8217;re fed the same strain in the same dose of this bacteria. So essentially, for four days straight, I&#8217;m going to graft larvae into plates. So every single day, I have a new set of larval plates. Which will have a news day one, or first in-star larvae within it, so that by 3 days post-grafting, we&#8217;ll have a wider range of ages. That being said, this is just a graphical representation. I&#8217;ll, of course, randomize the ages within the plates. With that, we will infect all of these with the best strain and the best dose, and determine what&#8217;s happening.<\/td><td>Title: Plans for remaining objectives.  Photo of 4 48 well plates containing larvae of different ages<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And then the last thing that we&#8217;ll do, once we have the most susceptible age, the best dose and the best strain to harm our larvae, we will infect our larvae with different stressors, like field-relevant fungicide exposure, because we know that fungicides are heavily used in the blueberry system. I&#8217;ll also expose them to poor nutrition, and then a combination of these stressors alongside European foulbrood to basically see if one stressor is exasperating this disease more than others, and what is going on, basically, just so that we can generate mitigative measures to improve our colony health. <\/td><td>Title: Identify the interactions between fungicide and poor nutrition. Graphic of centrifuge tubes, a pesticide applicator, and 96-well plate with larva in cells<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So, with that, I wanted to say thank you all so much for being on today. Like I said, this is a huge project with plenty of collaborators who have helped out, sharing protocols or expertise. <\/td><td>Photos of researchers involved in this research and logos of funding agencies and university involvement<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>I wanted to thank our funding sources, my lab, the beekeepers and blueberry growers who assisted, and all of our technicians. And with that, I think I can take any questions.<\/td><td>Title: Acknowledgements. Photos of lab members, universities, funding agencies, beekeepers and growers involved in this research<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Bri: All right, great presentation, Mckaela. I don&#8217;t see any questions yet, but we&#8217;ll go ahead and just leave some time for people to type what they&#8217;re thinking. If anyone is not seeing the Q&amp;A box, you can try to pull it up through your zoom in the settings or in the more tab, but it is enabled for participants.<br>Okay, we got one question. If this recording will be available for review. And yes, it will. Yes, there was a lot of material covered today. This is being recorded. If you&#8217;d like, you can subscribe to our Youtube channel or just visit our Youtube channel to view it. I&#8217;ll be uploading it probably within the next day. And it&#8217;s @wsubeeprogram. So I&#8217;ll type that here.<br><br>Okay, thank you, Michaela. I did not take copious notes because I wanted to listen. We&#8217;ll be receiving at least part of your will we be receiving part of your slide deck? So are you willing to share your slides with participants?<br><br>Mckaela: I am willing to share whatever you need. Also, if it is going on YouTube, though, I don&#8217;t know if you need it, but I am happy to share.<br><br>Bri: Okay, do you mind putting your email in the chat for people, and then I will also send everyone a follow-up email with the link to Youtube with Mckaela CC&#8217;d in there, so you&#8217;ll have her email there as well. Okay, we got a question &#8211; there&#8217;s no apiary inspector in Washington. Is there another way for help?<br><br>Mckaela: I would recommend reaching out to researchers, first of all. First of all, if you ever have European fowl brood within your colonies, I might be highly interested in paying you a visit. WSU does have tons of support. Bri is running our extension, and she&#8217;s very supportive. No, we do not have an apiary inspector, and sometimes that&#8217;s a major disadvantage.<br><br>Bri: Would you recommend giving colonies a pollen patty during blueberry pollination?<br><br>Mckaela: That is a great question. So it depends on the on the beekeeping scale that you have. What I recommend whenever I&#8217;m talking to beekeeping clubs with individuals who maybe just have a few colonies who might not want to spend money on pollen patties, for example. If you have a pollen trap, I would suggest that you trap for pollen when there&#8217;s a really heavy pollen flow, and then whenever your colonies are in a system where pollinating your garden, you have tons of blueberries accessible, maybe just feed them back some of the pollen that they&#8217;ve already foraged, and whenever. You have it stored, you&#8217;ll want it in a freezer, um, just to keep it good, or keep it nutritionally at its best. That being said, whenever bees are on blueberry pollination, and maybe you&#8217;re in a commercial operation, I would suggest either feeding supplementally, so providing something like a protein or pollen patty. Or, ensuring that you&#8217;re in a spot with supplemental forage. Because, like I said, having a wide variety of species of pollen that&#8217;s accessible can be really beneficial to your bees.<br><br>Bri: How long do infected combs with EFB bacteria live in dead-out colonies?<br><br>Mckaela: That is a great question, and honestly, we don&#8217;t have the answer. So I have taken frames with infected European fowl brood, and this disease is really, really hard to work with, so I&#8217;ve tried to feed it back to colonies and reinfect colonies, and I haven&#8217;t been successful. But again, that might just be a scientist&#8217;s curse. I am sure that having EFB bacteria on your tools can\u2026 it definitely can transmit it as you&#8217;re actively beekeeping, but I&#8217;m sure it can transmit it after some time in storage. I know for American foulbrood, things can last years. And then be put back in a colony and reinfect that colony. So there&#8217;s always a likelihood that it will stay alive long-term. I&#8217;ve personally had issues figuring that out, and I&#8217;m not seeing a lot of literature scientifically supporting how long it will stay alive.<br><br>Bri: Do you infect hives when you do research with EFB?<br><br>Mckaela: I&#8217;ve tried. A lot of scientists have tried. Whenever I am working with colonies and trying to better understand this disease, it&#8217;s really important that things are contained, so I would never go out into our apiary and spray a bunch of EFB in there. And intentionally infect colonies that could then infect others. We have tons of tent setups that are really helpful for research. But I&#8217;ve been unsuccessful, like I said.<br><br>Bri: Is this the same study that Dr. Kuesel talked about in the last webinar?<br><br>Mckaela: So the first part that I mentioned, yes, Dr. Kuesel is alongside Brandon Hopkins. He&#8217;s been working on this major specialty crop research initiative grant that Oregon State University has worked on as well. I am just the Mississippi counterpart come to Washington. But then all of the brood work that I&#8217;m doing, so everything I talked about that I&#8217;m doing within the lab, that has nothing to do with that project. These are totally separate.<br><br>Bri: What do you know about EFB&#8217;s biofilm from another researcher&#8217;s paper? Can&#8217;t remember the name right now.<br><br>Mckaela: That&#8217;s a great question. I think I would need to see the paper to talk more about it. You should write me an email.<br><br>Bri: What about an EFB case in a stationary apiary without significant blueberries around? Is pushing pollen also suggested? <br><br>Mckaela: I think if you have active symptomatic European foulbrood, like I said, and this could just be my bias and my own opinions, but I really do think that adequate nutrition is the best thing that you can do for your bees. So I would never recommend putting yourself out and spending a ton of money to support your bees by buying pollen, especially if you&#8217;re on a smaller scale. But that&#8217;s when when, like I mentioned, feeding pollen back to bees can be really helpful. I think providing more feed can never really hinder your colonies. It can only really help mitigate other stressors.<br><br>Bri: Hobbyist and small-scale beekeepers can&#8217;t afford a vet to get a vet directive. Is there any way that a bee club could work with a vet and represent however many of its members that encounter EFB or need antibiotics? Maybe a single master beekeeper visiting each beekeeper to verify presence of EFB, and then using a club vet directive for the members in need of antibiotics. Is there any way to create this with with a club of, say, 50 to 100 members?<br><br>Mckaela: That&#8217;s a really great question. My gut response is probably not. It&#8217;s like, because writing a VFD is so similar to getting a prescription. It&#8217;s one of the unfortunate issues with the FDA&#8217;s intervention in. In EFB treatment or AFB treatment, antibiotic treatment, you could never go to a pharmacist and receive care without being their patient financially. So, I would say it&#8217;s worth asking your local veterinarian if they would be willing to work with you, but it&#8217;s my understanding that vets actually have to come out and inspect for disease themselves. <br><br>Bri: We hear a lot about lipids for health, so many products out there are insufficient. Is there a good source for substitutes or creating our own? <br><br>Mckaela: I don&#8217;t want to speak too much on commercial availability. I think it&#8217;s always fine to try to make your own supplemental feeds. Read up on online articles, sources to determine what has worked for other people and going by trial. I don&#8217;t I can&#8217;t really speak on the efficacy of commercial versus man-made pollen nutrition availability. I would that&#8217;s probably a really great place to talk with a local beekeeping club and see what&#8217;s working for everyone.<br><br>Bri: You have information on which counties in Washington have most infection rates for EFB?<br><br>Mckaela: I do not. I&#8217;ve only been in Washington for about a year, and another issue with European foulbrood infection is it&#8217;s very word of mouth anecdotal, which is where you can come into play if you have infection or EFB where you think you have EFB. I would love to know.<br><br>Bri: Okay, how about the use of a lateral test? <br><br>Mckaela: So what I mentioned earlier, the lateral test, the only one commercially available that I know of is from Vita Bee, and that is actually what I use within a field to diagnose EFB. I can always take things back to the lab and have maybe a more accurate lab test. But those have worked really well for me. I&#8217;m not recommending that everyone go out and spend $12 every time you think you have EFB, but they are a very helpful tool.<br><br>Bri: Okay, these were all very great questions. I don&#8217;t see any other questions in the Q&amp;A box. So I&#8217;m going to end it here. But again, I will be sending out the YouTube link once it&#8217;s all uploaded with Mckaela&#8217;s email in that email. So you&#8217;ll be able to ask any other questions you have later, It looks like, Hannah Blackburn, who you know, Mckaela, gave Katie Buckley&#8217;s information with the WSDA [in the chat]. And it looks like someone&#8217;s raising your hand, but unfortunately, I&#8217;m sorry, we don&#8217;t have the feature enabled for people to speak during the webinar, so if you could try to, type your question. We will stay on here for just a little longer [pause] And possibly, if you&#8217;re not able to ask your question live, again, Mckaela will be available over email. So I am going to stop the webinar here. Thank you all so much for attending. We do have two more webinars. The next webinar is in April on the third Thursday at 6 p.m. to register to that, you can go to our upcoming events page on our bees.wsu.edu website. And remember, before you close your browser, you should be prompted for that survey. Thank you so much for attending.<\/td><td>As Bri and Mckaela talk, screens switch. <br>Bri is in red shirt on screen wearing glasses and a Washington State University Logo in the background. Mckaela is in white shirt with beige background. <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Text Transcript with Description of Visuals Audio Visual All right, let&#8217;s get started. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our second webinar of our 2026 webinar series. I&#8217;m Bri Price. I&#8217;m the WSU Bee program extension coordinator. We have two more webinars happening this year for more information about those and to register, please visit our upcoming [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8511,"featured_media":0,"parent":21,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1132"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1132"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1142,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1132\/revisions\/1142"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}