Meet Maple! This 10-year-old English springer spaniel has an important job: She helps prevent honeybees from getting sick. Maple has been trained to use her super-sensitive nose to sniff out American foulbrood. This deadly and highly contagious disease is caused by a bacterium—a single-celled organism—that infects honeybee colonies. It’s hard work for humans to inspect individual colonies for this disease. But a dog can quickly run past hundreds of hives, alerting its handler if it smells an infestation.
Maple is working with researchers at Michigan State University to develop programs that train dogs to detect honeybee diseases. Thanks to public health efforts like this, American foulbrood is no longer a big problem in the U.S. But honeybees still face other threats, says Meghan Milbrath, an insect scientist at Michigan State, especially from pests, pesticides, poor nutrition, and pathogens.