the health of animals people and the environment are interconnected so you have to think in terms of an interconnected system every time you look at a major health topic we all live in an ecosystem the ecosystem is evolving our knowledge about it is evolving insects is such an important part of every single ecosystem on Earth insects are working for us on a mass scale and about a third of the crops and food that we eat require insect pollination by investing in good pollinator populations we're
investing not only in our food but in the most healthful and nutritious food that agriculture produces we can't survive on this planet or any other planet if we don't protect our insects at the moment we see bees under a lot of stress the honey be which is our most important pollinator around the world they dying and they're dying on mass bees have a lot of problems and an awful lot of it is caused by diseases one of which is American foul brood American foul brood is a bacterial disease I somet
imes call it the anthrax of the Beehive because it takes a very very small amount just 10 15 spores of bacteria to eventually kill that whole Hive it's a global pandemic honeybees are shipped Around The World At Large Scale and is that shipment the diseases spread across countries no one thought it was possible to vaccinate honey bees but through an understanding how honey bees are transferring signals from one generation to another we have developed a novel technique which allows us to vaccinat
e honey bees against diseases the intellectual Firepower behind this project rests with dalan and their science team uh they are the innovators they are the discoverers they are the producers ERS of this technology and it really is an amazing breakthrough and it's a process of inherited immunity in the case of the American F brw product degraded particles of the actual bacterium are fed to the honeybee Queen and that degraded bacterium actually ends up in every egg that She lays our vaccine Buil
ds on that naturally occurring mechanism show was 2007 we were kind of in the middle of of colony collapse disorder every beekeeper in the country was experiencing higher than average losses and we got very enthusiastic about new approaches new ways of staying keeping bees healthy we've inoculated approximately 4 to 5,000 Queens we haven't seen American fou brood show up in in in those colonies the bees that are inoculated kind of seem to have a more robust tolerance to other viruses it's indica
ted for organic agriculture there are no harmful preservatives or additives that we put into the vaccine I think we're seeing a paradigm shift because this is the first and only company right now that actually is tackling the idea of vaccinating an invertebrate we Tred to understand the natural mechanisms how insects actually are fighting against the diseases and this mechanism is a platform Tech technology it opens up a possibility to develop similar vaccination procedures also for otherb we ar
e opening up this new animal health space and so these new industries of alternative protein of using insects for animal feed or human food will need safe sustainable prophylactic Solutions you cannot use antibiotics you cannot use chemicals in these animals it will end up in the food chain so you need vaccines if we don't have pollinators good food will be unaffordable for many people it's already unaffordable it going to only get worse the value of honeybees as pollinators and pollinators in g
eneral tends to be tied to the economic welfare of the society that we're talking about I strongly believe that insect health and especially Pol Nature Health and honeybee health is important for every single living being on Earth these are huge problems that we are dealing with that is going to have an enormous impact on our lives on our safety on our survival that I said I can do something we need to do something
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