Allie Donaldson, DVM, discusses the Honey Bee Veterinary Consortium in a dvm360 interview.
Allie Donaldson, DVM, is a past president of the Honey Bee Veterinary Consortium (HBVC), who attended the Honey Bee Symposium at the 2026 Veterinary Meeting & Expo (VMX) in Orlando, Florida, hosted by the North American Veterinary Community. Donaldson shared information with VMX attendees about the HBVC and how it can be used as a resource for the practice of honeybee medicine. In this video, Donaldson explains the goals of the HBVC and the opportunities it offers to the veterinary community.
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The following is a transcript of the video:
Allie Donaldson, DVM: The…HBVC was formed back in 2017 when bees were included [with]…food-producing animals. That meant that if beekeepers wanted to get antibiotics, they now needed to call a veterinarian. We formed this consortium to help support veterinarians in learning about bees, learning about honeybee medicine, and how we as veterinarians can support beekeepers, support the beekeeping community, and…bring our expertise with science, medicine, and herd medicine, specifically—those sorts of things—into beekeeping.
With HBVC, we have yearly conferences where we train brand-new beekeepers, veterinarians, [and] brand-new veterinarians who are interested in becoming honeybee veterinarians, as well as those veterinarians who are experienced beekeepers, [on] how to utilize our skills and…help beekeepers through veterinary medicine.
We also have a certification program. This is a program that is self-paced, but there are multiple modules to teach us how to really utilize the knowledge we have as veterinarians to help support the beekeeping community’s health, to reduce the diseases in hives, [and] how to train beekeepers on the management style we learn about in veterinary school with all of the other species. The certification program is really a great way to have our members be more confident when they go out and do their first hive inspection, when they take that first step out and pull out that first frame of bees, and interact with that beekeeper on what disease processes might be affecting their hive and how we might go about treating those.
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