本文选自《经济学人》3月20日刊文章。研究表明，蜜蜂比人类更早使用疫苗接种，而且它们还懂得二次接种疫苗。蜂王在产卵之前，会给蜂卵注入病原体蛋白片段，触发幼蜂免疫系统发育，工蜂在照顾幼蜂时，会再次通过蜂王浆给幼蜂进行二次接种。世间万物比我们想象的要智慧。
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Honeybees run vaccination programmes, tooThe inoculations are conducted via royal jelly
AN OLD SAW has it that there is nothing new under the sun. But it may still come as a surprise that human beings are not alone in having invented vaccination. Work just published in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Gyan Harwood of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, confirms that honeybees got there first. It also suggests that they run what look like the equivalent of prime-boost childhood vaccination programmes.
虽然有句古话说，太阳底下无新鲜事，但人类并不是发明疫苗的唯一物种这件事仍然让人很惊讶。伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校的吉安·哈伍德在《实验生物学杂志》上发表的研究证实，蜜蜂（早在人类之前）就已经懂得接种疫苗，它们进行的疫苗接种类似于儿童疫苗接种计划。Being gregarious, honeybees are at constant risk of diseases sweeping through their hives. Most animals which live in crowded conditions have particularly robust immune systems, so it long puzzled entomologists that honeybees do not. Indeed, they actually possess fewer immune-related genes than most solitary bees.
蜜蜂作为群居动物一直存在疾病在蜂巢迅速传播的风险。大多数生活在拥挤环境中的动物都有特别强大的免疫系统，但蜜蜂却没有，这个问题一直困扰着昆虫学家。事实上，它们的免疫相关基因比大多数独居的蜜蜂都要少。Part of the answer, discovered in 2015, is that queen bees vaccinate their eggs by transferring into them, before they are laid, fragments of proteins from disease-causing pathogens. These act as antigens which trigger the development of a protective immune response in the developing young. But that observation raises the question of how the queen receives her antigen supply in the first place, for she subsists purely on royal jelly, a substance secreted by worker bees which are at the stage of their lives (which precedes the period that they spend flying around foraging fornectar and pollen) when they act as nurses to larvae. Dr Harwood therefore wondered if the nurses were incorporating into the royal jelly they were producing, fragments from pathogens they had consumed while eating the victuals brought to the hive by the foragers.
- forage for: 觅食；forager：觅食者
在2015年的一项发现给出了部分答案，蜂王在产卵之前，会将能致病的病原体蛋白质片段转入蜂卵中，这相当于为蜂卵注射疫苗，这些蛋白片片段相当于抗原，会触发发育中的幼蜂的保护性免疫反应。但这个观察又提出了一个问题：蜂王最初是如何得到抗原的？蜂王仅靠蜂王浆为生，蜂王浆由工蜂在它们看护幼蜂的时候分泌产生（这个阶段在它们出去觅食花蜜和花粉之前）。因此，哈伍德博士在想，是不是这些看护幼蜂的工蜂在吃觅食的工蜂带回来的食物时，摄入了病原体，而他们将病原体片段加入到了它们生产的蜂王浆中。
