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.
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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