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.
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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