Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday, December 19th. Today on Forbes, this startup makes a

vaccine for honeybees, shrimp, are next. How do you vaccinate a honeybee? And will beekeepers

care enough to do it? Those are the questions Annette Kleiser has been wrestling since founding

Dallin Animal Health

in 2018. Five years after launching the startup, the government approved an oral vaccine

her team created that's designed for the world's beekeepers to feed to worker bees, which

then feed it to their queens in royal jelly. The result, strangely enough, is immunity for the queen's

offspring. Now, Kleizer is on a mission to get as many bees vaccinated as she can, helping to safeguard

not only the hives, but the crops that they pollinate. She said, quote, we know that the loss of

insects is dramatic for this world.

We cannot survive on this planet or anywhere else without insects.

The Dallin vaccine defends against a devastating bacterial disease aptly named American Fowl Brood,

and Kleiser sees it as a first step toward keeping the roughly 3 million honeybee colonies in the U.S. healthy.

It's not the only disease bees can suffer from. About 50% of colonies and millions of bees

die each year from a variety of ailments, including a nasty parasite called the Varroa mite,

pesticide poisoning, inadequate nutrition, and the stress of traveling around the

country to pollinate crops. Those are devastating numbers for beekeepers. Klyzer and her team at

Athens-Georgia-based Dallin Animal Health believe specially designed bee vaccines are an important

tool in keeping more bees alive, enabling commercial beekeepers, who may have

some 5,000 to 30,000 colonies, to continue bringing them around the country so they can pollinate crops

like almonds, blueberries, cucumbers, and apples. As Dallin was taking its vaccine against

American fowl brood through clinical trials,

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