Bees play a vital role in pollinating different plants, which will greatly contribute to the development of plant wealth. They also produce honey, which is one of the most important natural foods that are characterized by many nutritional benefits, as well as many benefits to human health, strengthening immunity and resistance to many diseases. Therefore, diseases affecting bees represent major challenges in the field of agriculture in general and the field of bees particularly.
The AFB and EFB diseases are the most affecting disorders of bees and the most destructive to the hives. So that, searching for new ways to resist them is of a great interest at the Egyptian agricultural sector without resorting to antibiotics.
To suppress the activity of P. larvae, the causative agent of AFB, we applied four different experiments as follow:
1)    Evaluation of the antioxidant activity of basil, thyme, lemongrass, and peppermint via in vitro studies
2)    Estimation of the antimicrobial activity of the studied EOs
3)    Field experiment
4)    In silico analysis for the proteome of P. larvae to find potential drug targets.
To conclude, we ended with the following findings:
 I.      GC/MS analysis of tested EOs showed that the major

 By analyzing the antioxidant activity of the studied EOs

 III.      The evaluation of the antimicrobial activity of tested EOs came out with the following points:
 IV.      Field experiment
The results of infection with different isolates showed that there were only two isolates which caused different pathological symptoms of bee brood in the hive, therefore we named them M1 and M2. To further deepen our knowledge about these two isolates, we performed molecular biology and field antimicrobial studies to have the following:

The partial sequence analysis of the 16S rRNA gene from the isolates showed that the bacterial isolate P. larvae X and P showed most closely relation with identity of 99.90% with both strains PL 35 and PL 324, while the identity was 99.66, 98.80, 98.79, 98.44, 98.40, 98.39, 98.36, 98.18% with PL strains 9, 87, 38, 12, 17, 96, 76, 34 respectively.
Usage of computational tools against P. larvae


A reverse vaccinology protocol has been executed on the P. larvae proteome (26603 proteins) to find potential drug targets to end with 3 probable candidates which can be described as essential, non-homologous, virulent factors, cytoplasmic or cytoplasmic membrane proteins.
Finally, we can say that the tested EOs (basil, thyme, peppermint and lemongrass) are promising agents against the P. larvae based on their antioxidant and antibacterial activities either at the laboratory or at the field. In the near future, we aim to screen the bioactive compounds libraries against the three probable drug targets at the P. larvae using molecular docking to tackle the damaging effects of this pathogen.