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- cross-posted to:
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Scientists have developed a breakthrough food supplement that could help save honeybees from devastating declines. By engineering yeast to produce six essential sterols found in pollen, researchers provided bees with a nutritionally complete diet that boosted reproduction up to 15-fold. Unlike commercial substitutes that lack key nutrients, this supplement mimics natural pollen’s sterol profile, giving bees the equivalent of a balanced diet.
TL;DR: Bees need balanced nutrition and we figured out how to make healthy bee food.
okay, next question: why aren’t they getting those sterols?
follow up: are wild, native bees also affected, or is it just the European honeybees?
A healthy hive would get proper nutrients. Usually you only need to feed a hive pollen when it is a weaker hive that doesn’t have the population needed to collect pollen. This boosts brood production and the hive can recover faster.
Another issue is commercial beekeeping. Hundreds of hives could be working a few square miles while in nature it would be just a few. Not enough resources for that many hives so weaker hives struggle. This is a human solution for a human problem.
TTBOMK, beekeepers feed bees sugar-syrup during the winter, to get them through, & to top-up their diet, so they produce more honey,
& feed them pollen in the spring ( activates swarming in them, so they have to be careful with that ).
Bees naturally get 1st-pollen from conifer trees, not flowers, from what I’ve seen, which would have a drastically different chemical-profile, so terpenes may be a meaningful antiviral for them, that they aren’t getting in the syrup-supplement, making them more prone to colony-collapse-disorder ( I’ve read that ALL colony-collapse-disorder bees are infected with both a virus & a fungus, don’t remember which, & that NONE of the still-healthy hives in that research had both those 2 items )
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That’s awesome! And the paper is open access :)
Beekeepers provide colonies with pollen substitutes, but these feeds do not sustain brood production because they lack essential sterols found in pollen.
So they were being starved by the bee farmers. Got it.
you mean bees need more than sugarwater to live? huh. what about high fructose corn syrup thren?
Farmers provide their animals, bees included, with what feed they can buy.
The fact that animal-feed is chemically-deficient isn’t the fault of the farmers, it is the fault of shoddy standards in animal-feed being more profitable than quality/integrity’s standards,
& nobody legislated proper-nutrition-requirements for things like animal-food, baby-food, etc.
For-profit operations ONLY increase their costs when that increases profits, XOR when they’re coerced into producing correct product/service.
Basic narcissism-centered economics, that.
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It’s a shame that it’s honeybee research. In Colorado one of our major pollinator ecology issues is that honeybees aren’t native and our 842 species of native bees have to compete with them during the three snow-free months. The apiaries doing better negatively impacts the broader goals of my pollinator gardens. Those native species are the rapidly dwindling ones we can’t replace commercially.
Whilst these initial results are promising, further large-scale field trials are needed to assess long-term impacts on colony health and pollination efficacy. Potentially, the supplement could be available to farmers within two years.
This new technology could also be used to develop dietary supplements for other pollinators or farmed insects, opening new avenues for sustainable agriculture.
