Dalan Animal Health is working to sell its bee vaccines to commercial beekeepers and governments – and potentially expand to other invertebrates.
By Amy Feldman, Forbes Staff
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 Dalan 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, she’s 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.
“We know that the loss of insects is dramatic for this world,” Kleiser said. “We cannot survive on this planet or anywhere else without insects.”
The Dalan vaccine defends against a devastating bacterial disease aptly named American Foulbrood, 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: “Imagine a cattle farmer losing 30 to 50% of their cattle each year,” said Matt Mulica, a senior project director at the Keystone Policy Center, which facilitates the Honey Bee Health Coalition. “How do you combat that?”
Kleiser and her team at Athens, Georgia-based Dalan 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.
“If you have an outbreak [of American Foulbrood], the spores have such resiliency that the recommended treatment is to kill all the bees and burn all the hives,” said Tom Chi, founder of At One Ventures, who invested in a $3.6 million seed round in summer 2022 as Dalan was taking its vaccine against American Foulbrood through clinical trials. “It’s catastrophic if you get it.”
Kleiser, who has a Ph.D. in neurophysiology from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, discovered the research that would lead her to bee vaccines when she was working to help universities transform academic work into businesses. While visiting the University of Helsinki, she met Estonian biologist and zoologist Dalial Freitak, who had an unorthodox idea: to inject an inactivated bacteria into a queen to improve the hive’s overall resilience to disease. Insects and other invertebrates don’t have antibodies like humans and other mammals do, so the traditional way of creating vaccines won’t work on them. “When I heard about the research, I was like, ‘Why isn’t anybody doing this?’” Kleiser recalled.
Kleiser spun Freitak’s research out of the university, then they created a vaccine that’s mixed into the so-called “queen candy” for the queens’ attendants, who then incorporate it into the royal jelly that is fed to the queen. The result is that the queen’s larvae will be primed against the disease when they hatch.
Beekeepers are watching closely. “This is really new. I think that’s why it’s caused a lot of interest and excitement,” said Blake Shook, a commercial beekeeper in Leonard, Texas, who is testing out the new vaccine. And national governments are interested too: Kleiser said she is in conversation with half-dozen countries in Asia, South America and Europe about buying the vaccine to protect their countries’ bees (she declined to name which ones). She’s raised $14 million in venture funding from At One Ventures and Prime Movers Lab so far. While this is an early-stage startup with revenue below $1 million, Kleiser is optimistic she’ll be able to land major contracts with both governments and commercial beekeepers in the next year.
But there’s a major hurdle: convincing beekeepers that the cost of $10 per vaccine is worth it. “Everyone is interested,” Shook told Forbes. “But it is expensive, and beekeeping isn’t exactly a high-margin business.”
Russell Heitkam, whose Heitkam’s Honey Bees is a major producer of queens (he sells some 75,000 of them a year), said his customers are actively trying to understand the economics and value of vaccination. For a commercial beekeeper with 30,000 hives, the cost of vaccinating at $10 a queen adds up quickly, to roughly $300,000. Heitkam, who is working with Dalan on trials of the vaccine, told Forbes he’d like to see proof that the vaccines allow each colony of bees to become more dense with healthy insects that can produce greater quantities of honey and do more pollination. Dalan argues that the cost to vaccinate will be more than offset by having fewer bees die off and healthier bees survive, but Heitkam and other beekeepers want to see the vaccine do more than just protect against American Foulbrood, which commercial beekeepers can in part prevent through better beekeeping practices, like not sharing equipment between colonies and cleaning hive tools carefully.
“People call me and say, ‘Hey, I want to get some queens, should I get them vaccinated?” he said. “An average queen is $28, and now you want to put another $10 on top of that, so you need to be able to monetize that $10.”
But, he points out, “If their vaccine can produce one more frame of bees at pollination time, that will pay for itself.” A frame is the movable part of the hive and can typically hold 2,000 to 2,500 bees.
Adds Chris Hiatt, a commercial beekeeper with Hiatt Honey who is also president of the American Honey Producers Association: “In beekeeping, it’s word of mouth. If someone cuts their winter losses in half because of these vaccinated queens, it would spread like wildfire.”
That’s just for one bee disease. Dalan’s researchers are studying whether its vaccine can provide protection against others, especially a particularly harmful one known as deformed wing virus. So far, experimental trials across 400 commercial hives have shown an 83% reduction in the levels of a highly transmissible variant of the virus. “Anything above 65% to 70% is considered effective treatment, and we’re well beyond that,” investor Chi said.
The next step is to expand beyond honeybees to other invertebrates, starting with shrimp. “It was clear for me from day one that this is not only the solution for one insect, but potentially for all invertebrates,” said Freitak, the company’s scientific cofounder.
Like beekeeping, shrimp farming — a $40 billion market — suffers from double-digit losses each year from diseases, despite relying heavily on chemical pesticides that take a heavy environmental toll. “There are billions of losses, and shrimp production is growing and has a big impact on mangroves because of the chemicals used in shrimp farming,” Kleiser said.
Since the immune system of shrimp is similar to that of bees, she thinks Dalan could vaccinate maternal shrimp similarly to queen bees. The company has begun testing vaccines for a common shrimp disease, known as white spot syndrome virus, starting with small shrimp and then as they get big enough for commercial sale. The company said it’s beginning to see promising results with a 64% survival rate in early tests at an aquaculture research facility. “In shrimp, everything has failed in the field,” she said. “We believe our approach is so different that we have a chance of cracking the market.”
If a vaccine works for bees and shrimp, what else might it be able to do? Longer term, Kleiser believes that even mosquitoes, known for carrying diseases like malaria and dengue fever to humans, could be vaccinated, reducing outbreaks worldwide. As climate change raises the risks of formerly tropical diseases spreading north, the ability to vaccinate insects could ultimately be as important for human health as for food security.
“It’s much, much bigger than the honeybee,” Kleiser said. “The honeybee is big because we need this animal to survive to feed us, but the science that is unfolding is way bigger than this.”