AFB detection dogs

American foulbrood (AFB) infects beehives. Detection is primarily done through observation by beekeepers and specialist experts. To find faster and more-robust methods of detection, dog trainer Pete Gifford has teamed up with apiculturist Jason Prior and a team of scientists to look at a novel method using dogs to detect the microorganism that causes the disease.

Note: This video was made part-way through the process of training the dogs. The initial work is now complete.

Questions for discussion

• What are some of the benefits and challenges of relying on human observation to detect AFB?

• What are some of the benefits and challenges of relying on using dogs to detect AFB?

• Dog trainer Pete Gifford says, “The methodology needed testing, and we need to put some science behind that.” What do you think he means by this, and why is it important?

Transcript

Roger Bourne

American foulbrood or AFB is a highly infectious disease that costs the beekeeping industry millions of dollars each year. Now, a novel approach is under way to help manage the problem using detection dogs. Jason Prior from DownUnder Honey in partnership with dog trainer Pete Gifford has secured finance from MPI’s Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures fund and Apiculture New Zealand through the Honey Industry Trust and the Southern North Island Beekeeping Group. Now, teamed up with Massey University and Plant and Food Research, they’re developing the methodology to train dogs to reliably detect AFB.

Jason Prior 

American foulbrood is – hence the name – it’s a smelly, rotting disease of the larvae or pupae within a beehive, and it causes the colony to get weaker and weaker over time. It’s a very old bacteria, it’s a member of the penicillin family, and a very simple bacteria. And it’s pretty much everywhere that bees exist globally, so it’s been in New Zealand since bees were introduced back in the 1800s. Currently, it’s below 0.5% reported – it has been higher than that in the past. It used to be managed by MAF. So years ago, we used to have MAF inspectors who would go around and look for it. Since the Biosecurity Act was changed in the 90s, it’s now managed through our Pest Management Plan.

Commercial beekeepers would generally look at colonies every time they visit an apiary. Some obviously don’t or some miss the signs. There’s a lot of new beekeepers in the industry, so we’ve virtually doubled the amount of people keeping bees in New Zealand in the last decade. And there’s a lot of people who probably don’t have necessarily the skills, and we do have cases where it’s missed.

The other challenge that we’ve got in the industry is hive density. There’s a lot more hives in New Zealand than it used to be. Back in the 2000s, we had less than 300,000 hives – there’s almost a million now. And the challenge for AFB is you’ve got a lot of hives in a very small area, and if you have a colony that dies from American foulbrood, it will have some honey stores in there and all the neighbouring bees will say, “Ooh, free lunch,” and they’ll go in there and they’ll steal the honey out and they take the spores that are in that honey back to their own colony, and over a period of time, that colony will succumb to the disease as well.

Overseas, American foulbrood is treated with things like antibiotics, things that we don’t have legal in New Zealand and have no wish to. In New Zealand, since I believe the 1920s, the treatment method for AFB is to destroy all components of the hive – all the honey, the bees themselves, the combs, the woodware. It can be quite devastating for beekeepers.

At the moment, our only toolset for identifying American foulbrood is visual inspections– and that’s a legal thing – and also doing – there are some tests that you can do. So there’s a bacteria agar plate-type test, and there’s also DNA testing. What we, what we need to do if we want to eradicate it in this country – and that is the ultimate objective – is we need to find the spores that exist in most businesses or in the odd location within the hobby community, and we need to get rid of that equipment. The problem is finding it. So you can have hives that have quite low levels of the disease and they will control it. Beekeepers often miss those hives – it can be very hard to identify. But they’ll show up over winter as the colony gets weaker. Most businesses also have – they may have taken honey boxes off colonies that had low levels the previous season and then those boxes are put in the shed and then put out on another hive the next year, and that spreads the disease around. If we can use dogs to identify both of those really hard to find sort of cases, that would be a real benefit of trying to eradicate the disease.

I’ve been acting as the industry sponsor for Pete, so I’m a member of the Southern North Island Beekeeping Group and also Apiculture New Zealand, and both the industry bodies have been supporting Pete through money. And I’m contracted through with the Sustainable Farming Fund as the legal entity, for want of a better description, to sponsor Pete’s project.

Pete Gifford

I can foresee a problem with them being as active as they are now that, no matter how trained the dogs are to search that hive, that’s going to be a massive deterrent.

Jason Prior

So Pete’s got four dogs ready to go. And we’re working on getting the spores and the bacteria in their clean format ready so that they can be trained, and then we can move on to whether or not it’s actually going to work.

Pete Gifford

In the UK, I ran a boarding kennel and a rescue centre for 25 years. And in that time that I got involved with the military and the Police and Customs and stuff. Some of the dogs that came in through our rescue centre really benefited going into a working home. So rather than suppressing the natural instinct of a working dog, we’ve sort of enhanced it, utilised it, and we put a lot of dogs into the Police and Corrections and suchlike.

The history of working with dogs sort of followed me into New Zealand, and I’m a Land Search and Rescue dog handler and I’ve got a few dogs that I train. I also provide dogs for certain government services.

I got approached by a lady local to me that knew my history of working with dogs and wondered whether it would be possible to train a dog to detect American foulbrood in the bees.

I believe there are dogs in New Zealand that have been trained to find AFB. But it was in my opinion that I thought that the methodology needed testing, and we need to put some science behind that. So I thought it may be a good idea to get some scientists and suchlike to create target odours of the disease that we’re looking to find in hives and then set it up in a way that the dog could have a chance to win.

They need to have prey and play drive and a hunt mode, so predominantly gun dogs make a good set of dogs.

I’ll simply just turn this around, put it into a different position.

I have a good friend at Massey University who is a lecturer. And I convinced her to come on board for the scientific side. And then I found probably the most influential person to the AFB side in New Zealand currently, which was a lady that works at Plant and Food Waikato. And together, we decided that, as a team, we’d be able to culture the spores. Massey would be able to oversee the – and peer review the trial, and then I could just produce the dog expertise.

Jason Prior

The dogs are potentially a tool. They, they have the ability, they’re a lot faster than people. If we can identify, you know, that out of 20 hives down the road here, one of them does have AFB, potentially we can do a follow-up and actually do a visual or a DNA test on that hive and just confirm it and then burn it. A dog could go in and, in a matter of minutes, do a whole apiary that might have taken a beekeeper 2 hours to have a good look at.

Acknowledgements Video clip courtesy of Showdown Productions.