- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Honey bee experts at UC Davis and Oregon State University (OSU) will teach the comprehensive, asynchronous course, "Honey Bees and Beekeeping for Veterinarians." Registration is now underway at http://www.wifss.ucdavis.edu/beevets/. The course is intended for veterinarians, veterinary technicians, apiculture educators, apiary inspectors and beekeepers in California and Oregon. Participants are encouraged to register today; the course will be available only until June 30, 2020.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD) addresses antibiotic resistance and antimicrobial use in the feed or water of food-producing animals. The VFD implementation aims to ensure the judicious use of antimicrobials, and to minimize the impact of their use in colonies.
This means that beekeepers now need to establish a veterinarian-client-patient relationship to obtain the antibiotics they need to manage foulbrood and other microbial diseases, according to the course instructors.
The training is being offered by the laboratory of Extension apiculturist Elina Lastro Niño, affiliated with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources; the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine; and OSU.
Course authors and developers are the Western Institute for Food and Security (WIFSS), UC Davis; Elina Niño and Bernardo Niño; Jonathan Dear, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, and Ramesh Saglii, OSU's Honey Bee Laboratory.
Instructors said that participants, upon completion of the course, will be able to:
- Describe the importance of honey bees
- Explain the veterinarian's role in commercial beekeeping
- Recognize distinguished characteristics of honey bees
- Recognize specialized beekeeping equipment, including personal protective equipment (PPE)
- Recognize the components of a hive inspection
- Describe honey bee immunity against pathogens, pests and diseases
- Describe common pests and diseases that may impact honey bees
- Describe how the Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD) governs the use of antimicrobial drugs in apiculture
Honey bees are responsible for pollinating one-third of the American diet. They pollinate such specialty crops as apples, melons, cranberries, pumpkins, squash, broccoli, and almonds. However, annual honey bee colony losses are high due to a variety of environmental and biological causes, including bacterial diseases. Historically, beekeepers have self-prescribed antibiotics to control these diseases.
Funding for the development of the “Honey Bees and Beekeeping for Veterinarians” course was made possible by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Specialty Crop Multi-State Program through an agreement between the California Department of Food and Agriculture and The Regents of the University of California, Davis (agreement number 17-0727-001-SF).
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Mark your calendar!
"Beekeeping and Management" will be part of the two-day UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine's 2019 winter conference presented by its Center for Continuing Education in February 2019.
The conference, covering several vet med topics or tracks, is set for Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 9-10. The beekeeping portion is on Sunday morning, Feb. 10.
California Extension apiculturist Elina Lastro Niño, based in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, will present the three seminars dealing with "Beekeeping and Management" in the Gladys Valley Hall, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
The beekeeping schedule:
- 8:10 to 9 a.m.: "Honey Bee Biology and Apiculture Overview"
- 9:10 to 10 a.m.: "Common Issues in American Apiaries"
- 10:30 to 11:20 a.m.: "Honey Bee Bacterial Diseases and Antiobiotic Use"
Special pricing for those interested in attending only the "beekeeping track" is available, announced Saundra Wais, program manager for the Center for Continuing Professional Education. The onsite fee for this section is $45. A live webinar option is available for $40 for those who cannot be on campus, she said.
Several other tracks are scheduled, including Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM), Veterinary Technician (Vet Tech), Feline Dentistry Lab, and Food Animal Reproduction and Medicine (FARM) Club. Some 20 speakers are planned.
Further information, including pricing and registration fees, is available on the Center for Continuing Education site or by contacting Wais at sjwais@ucdavis.edu or (530) 752-3905.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Lark Coffey, an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and a member of the Center for Vectorborne Diseases, will speak on "Zika Virus in Macaques, Mice and Mosquitoes: Contrasting Virulence and Transmissibility in Disparate Hosts."
And her host is medical entomologist and seminar coordinator Geoffrey Attardo, assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. This is part of the department's series of fall seminars.
Coffey says on her website: "Mosquito-borne viruses like Zika, chikungunya, West Nile, St. Louis encephalitis and dengue virus are expanding to cause more human infections worldwide. Unfortunately, no licensed human vaccines for these viruses are available. Management of disease is therefore restricted to palliative care for infected people and minimizing exposure to mosquitoes. Our research focuses on several central themes with a common goal of reducing the burden of disease caused by arboviruses. These include: understanding viral genetic factors that promote arbovirus outbreaks predicting viral mutations that enhance arbovirus transmissibility by mosquitoes and disease in humans or animals increasing safety of candidate live-attenuated vaccines improving arbovirus surveillance in mosquitoes."
Her abstract of her seminar Nov. 7 is technical. "Fetal microcephaly and death are now recognized as severe forms of congenital Zika syndrome; however, it is still unclear whether recent Zika virus (ZIKV) mutations contribute to this phenotype," Coffey says in her abstract. "We identified a single intrahost variant in the ZIKV NS2B protein (NS2BM1404I) from a rhesus macaque (RM) fetus that died after experimental ZIKV inoculation in the first trimester. Targeted deep sequencing flanking NS2B1404 in subsequent cohorts of RM mothers and their fetuses identified NS2BM1404I at minority frequency and sometimes at consensus levels in 3 additional dead or stillborn RM fetuses and/or the plasma of their mothers and in 2 more RM mother and fetus pairs whose fetuses survived to near term or were born alive. In outbred pregnant mice inoculated subcutaneously, we observed that NS2BI1404 engineered into an infectious clone confers fetal infection while ZIKV-NS2BM1404 does not. By examining sequence data from recent epidemics, we found that NS2BM1404I occurs rarely (5/500, 1%) in consensus human ZIKV genomes.
"We also deep sequenced ZIKV genomes from non-pregnant human adults, infants, and Ae. aegypti from the epidemic and observed that NS2BI1404 was more often present at intra-host levels in humans compared to mosquitoes," she continues in her abstract. "Since the primary ZIKV transmission cycle is human-mosquito-human, viral mutations that arise in one host must be maintained in the alternate host to be perpetuated. We therefore hypothesized that ZIKV NS2BM1404Imay not be efficiently transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, explaining its low frequency in humans during outbreaks. Using infectious clone-derived ZIKV, we examined vector competence in Ae. aegypti from Puerto Rico. Although infection and dissemination rates were not different, we found that Ae. aegypti did not transmit ZIKV-NS2BI1404 as efficiently compared to ZIKV-NS2BM1404 5 [7/20 (35%) versus 10/20 (50%), p>0.05] and 7 [3/20 (15%) versus 13/20 (65%), P<0.001, Chi-squared] days post-feed. The poor transmissibility of this potentially vertebrate adaptive ZIKV mutation may explain its low frequency in febrile humans. This data highlights the evolutionary complexity during arbovirus transmission cycles and suggests that some pathogenic viral mutations are not likely to spread in epidemics."
Coffey received her bachelor of science degree in biology from the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., in 2000, and her doctorate in experimental pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas in 2005.