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.
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.