Vet Students Are Learning to Treat a Very Different Kind of Patient: 50,000 Honeybees

At the University of Georgia, veterinary students are learning that sometimes the patient isn't a single animal. It's an entire hive.

Veterinary students spend years learning how to examine patients that bark, meow, moo, neigh, and occasionally try to bite them. At the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine, some students are learning to care for a patient that presents an entirely different challenge: it may contain tens of thousands of individuals, produce food, and come equipped with a lot of stingers.

Honeybees are becoming part of veterinary education at UGA as colonies across the country face significant losses and beekeepers increasingly need veterinarians who understand how to work with them.

The program was recently highlighted by WRDW/WAGT, whose Abby Kousouris visited UGA to see how veterinary students are being trained to evaluate and treat honeybee colonies. The timing is significant. According to the television station's report, more than 1.6 million hives have died nationwide, with losses linked to environmental stressors, severe drought, and bacterial infectious diseases.

For the veterinary students participating in the program, however, learning bee medicine isn't simply about responding to a national problem. It's also an introduction to a completely different way of thinking about what it means to have a patient.

When the Patient Is an Entire Colony

Fourth-year UGA veterinary student Madison Morgan didn't necessarily enter veterinary school expecting honeybees to become one of her interests. Once she was introduced to the idea of treating hives, that changed quickly.

“It was such an intriguing thought to me, and it just erupted into like this love that I have,” Morgan told WRDW/WAGT. “We’d be out here every Sunday treating the bees, helping feed them.”

Working with honeybees requires students to think differently from the way they might approach a dog or cat. The health of an individual bee matters, but veterinary decisions are made in the context of the colony. Students have to consider the health of the hive, disease pressure, parasites, nutrition, environmental conditions, and the complicated relationship between the animals and the ecosystem surrounding them.

For Morgan, one of the most stressful discoveries is finding varroa mites in a hive. The parasites can threaten colony health, turning what might look like a thriving hive into one that needs intervention.

And unlike many of the exotic species veterinary students encounter during their education, honeybees aren't simply an interesting elective patient. There is a practical need for veterinarians who know how to work with them.

Yes, Honeybees Need Veterinarians

The reason veterinarians have a role in bee health comes partly from the way honeybees are regulated.

As WRDW/WAGT explained in its report, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration categorizes honeybee colonies as food-producing animals. That means medications used to treat certain diseases in hives can fall under veterinary oversight, and beekeepers may need a licensed veterinarian to prescribe them.

That creates an unusual challenge. Beekeepers may legally need veterinary involvement, but honeybee medicine isn't something every small animal or large animal veterinarian encounters during traditional clinical training.

UGA is trying to change that by giving veterinary students exposure to hive health before they enter practice.

The program is led by Dr. Joerg Mayer, who sees bee medicine as valuable for another reason as well. Learning how to approach an unfamiliar species forces students to become adaptable clinicians rather than simply memorizing how to manage the patients they're most likely to see.

“If my students are able to think a little bit outside the box, they’re going to be so much better at their job for the next 35 years, because let’s face it, that’s what we’ve got to do constantly,” Mayer told WRDW/WAGT.

That's a pretty useful lesson whether your future patient has four legs or six.

Bee Medicine Is a One Health Story

Honeybee medicine also gives veterinary students an unusually clear example of how animal health, human health, agriculture, and environmental health can intersect.

A veterinarian treating a dog is primarily concerned with the health of that individual animal. A veterinarian working with a honeybee colony has to think about the health of thousands of animals simultaneously while also considering food production and the environment in which the colony lives.

That makes bee medicine a natural lesson in thinking beyond the individual patient.

The nationwide hive losses described by WRDW/WAGT illustrate why that perspective matters. Environmental stressors and drought don't stop at the edge of a hive, and infectious disease doesn't exist separately from the conditions in which animals are living. When multiple pressures converge, veterinarians have to understand the bigger biological picture rather than simply reach for a medication.

For students accustomed to approaching medicine one patient at a time, opening a hive can be a surprisingly effective way to learn that lesson.

Veterinary Medicine Keeps Getting Bigger

Perhaps the most interesting part of UGA's honeybee program is what it says about the veterinary profession itself.

Most veterinary students won't graduate and become full-time bee veterinarians. Many will enter companion animal practice, equine medicine, food animal medicine, research, public health, or one of the dozens of other careers available with a DVM degree.

But veterinary school isn't only about memorizing how to treat the patients you already expect to see. It's about learning how to approach the ones you don't.

That's what Mayer wants students to take away from working with honeybees. Veterinary medicine will continue to change over the course of a career that could span three or four decades. New diseases will emerge, regulations will change, technologies will evolve, and veterinarians will inevitably encounter problems nobody covered on the exam.

Learning to walk up to a hive filled with thousands of bees and think clinically about what is happening inside it is one way to practice being comfortable with the unfamiliar.

For Morgan, it has also opened the door to a part of veterinary medicine she didn't know she would love. What began as curiosity about the strange idea of a veterinarian treating honeybees became Sundays spent feeding colonies, searching for parasites, and worrying about what could be done when a hive was in trouble.

That's one of the great things about veterinary school. Sometimes you enter thinking you know exactly what kind of veterinarian you're going to become.

And then somebody hands you a bee suit.

This story was inspired by reporting from Abby Kousouris for WRDW/WAGT in Augusta, Georgia, published August 18, 2026. Quotes attributed to Madison Morgan and Dr. Joerg Mayer were originally reported by WRDW/WAGT.