Veterinary Students Learn to Treat Honeybees

Whatever hops through the door, said Dr. Jörg Mayer, an exotic-animal vet at the hospital. Or slithers. But on a breezy Sunday morning in April, Dr. Mayer was in a small, overgrown field, teaching students how to make house calls on a group of patients that rarely made it through the hospital door — or onto the standard veterinary curriculum.

The students climbed into stiff white jumpsuits, donned protective mesh hoods and prepared to make the rounds on hundreds of thousands of honeybees. Over the next two hours, the students examined more than a dozen hives, holding the wax combs up to the sun and searching for signs of disease: the stunted wings, discolored larvae or minuscule mites that can spell serious trouble for the nation’s bees and, by extension, its food supply. Honeybees are agricultural all-stars, pollinating roughly $15 billion worth of crops — more than 130 types of fruit, vegetables and nuts — every year.