“Bees are not really the first animal you think of when it comes to treating animals as a veterinarian,” says Haley Rubia, a third-year student at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM). But that is changing. Rubia and her fellow members of the college’s Bee Club are part of the vanguard of the new veterinary discipline of bee medicine.

Bees, like all animals, are vulnerable to both bacterial and viral infections. Because they live communally, when one bee gets sick, it’s likely to infect the entire hive. And because bees are so central to the general ecosystem, a bee epidemic could have serious consequences.

“They are the pollinators for our environment,” says Livia Gans, a third-year student who co-founded Bee Club with Rubia last year. “This means that they help provide us with the food that we eat and the food for animals. If bees go tumbling down, a lot of the biodiversity of the environment will go down as well.”

Although backyard beehives have become increasingly popular—even as the population of wild bees has declined—until recently, bee medicine was the domain of beekeepers, who cared for their own hives using over-the-counter medicines. That all changed in 2017 when, out of concern over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, new federal regulations officially reclassified bees as livestock. Now, beekeepers who need antibiotics have to get prescriptions from veterinarians.

“The only problem with that,” says Dr. Melinda Wilkins, an associate professor at CVM and the faculty advisor of Bee Club, “is that veterinarians didn’t know anything about bees.”

Wilkins herself is an exception. Ten years ago, when she lived in Michigan, she had a small apple orchard, and she began learning about the bees who lived there. Shortly after the new regulations went into effect, Michigan State, where she was a faculty member, became one of the first veterinary schools to start teaching courses in bee medicine. When Wilkins came to Minnesota, she brought her interest in bees with her, and when Rubia and Gans learned about bee medicine and decided to start their own club, they sought her out.

With Wilkins’ help, Rubia and Gans connected with the Bee Lab in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Studies. Scientists at the Bee Lab study honeybees, and members of the UMN Extension Program do community outreach and lead public education programs. Last March, the Lab worked with the Minnesota Honey Producers Association to get funding for two hives for the students. Two Bee Lab educators, Katie Lee and Becky Masterman, are teaching them how to care for the bees.

Much to the surprise of Rubia and Gans, more than 40 CVM students signed up for Bee Club. There were so many participants that the students had to tend to the bees in shifts. Once they set up the hives, they began to learn about bee behavior and about various bee diseases and how to care for them. They also learned how to harvest honey before they wrapped the hives up for the winter. In February, they decanted the honey into jars, which they plan to sell to other veterinary students to support Club activities.

Gans and Rubia have become so interested in bees and bee medicine that they’re taking online classes on the Veterinary Information Network with a professor at Michigan State. Meanwhile, the CVM continues to expand its own offerings. This spring, it will offer a new two-week rotation for fourth-year students in honeybee medicine and management.

Bee medicine is still so new that it’s unlikely that it could sustain a full-time practice, but both Gans and Rubia have fallen in love with bees and plan to continue working with them once they graduate, even if it’s just a few days a month.

“I thought it was going to be terrifying,” Gans says, “but once you’re out there with the hive and there’s bees buzzing around you, it’s almost peaceful. It’s like meditation. They’re wonderful little animals.”