It's becoming more and more obvious that the U.S. Government's answers for almost all health issues now are new vaccines.

Dalan Animal Health announced this week that the U.S. Department of Agriculture granted them a conditional license for the first-ever vaccine for bees.

The US Department of Agriculture has granted a conditional license to the first-ever vaccine for bees, Dalan Animal Health announced on Wednesday. The Athens, Georgia-based company has developed an oral prophylactic they hope will be effective against a highly destructive spore-transmitted bacterial infection.

"Our vaccine is a breakthrough in protecting honeybees," Dalan CEO Dr. Annette Kleiser said in a statement, suggesting it might "change how we care for insects, impacting food production on a global scale."

American Foulbrood is a bacterial infection transmitted to bee larvae by spores. While antibiotic treatment can mitigate the impact to adult bees, US regulations adopted almost a century ago require the burning of an infected colony.

Dalan's technology "uses a transgenerational immune priming approach," using the queen to pass the immunity onto larvae before they hatch. In practice, the vaccine containing "killed whole-cell Paenibacillus larvae bacteria" is passed along by worker bees to the queen via the royal jelly, and ends up in her ovaries. The company claims that efficacy studies have indicated this "may reduce larval death" associated with the Foulbrood infections.