Scientists found the missing nutrients bees need — Colonies grew 15-fold
Scientists found the missing nutrients bees need — Colonies grew 15-fold
www.sciencedaily.com
Scientists found the missing nutrients bees need — Colonies grew 15-fold
96 comments
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It has what bees crave!!
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Allow native wild flowers and plants to grow and get rid of the damn grass.
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Well this story is the bee's needs!
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Colonies fed with the enriched diet were more likely to continue rearing brood up to the end of the three-month period, whereas colonies on sterol-deficient diets ceased brood production after 90 days.
Uhh m not crazy right, that's the same thing?
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I’m with you, it’s confusing. But I think what it means is this:
The study ran for 90 days. Non-sterol bees had stopped doing bee sex by then. Sterol bees were doin it all the way up to the end of the 90 days - and then the study ended. We can therefore assume they wanted to continue having freaky beedsm sex for even longer.
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I could begrudgingly accept that, if that's what is it was
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one group continued to the end of the study period, the other group had stopped by the same time
or, one group stopped doing a thing, and the other group didn't show signs of stopping
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Some were observed brooding for up to 12 weeks!
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I laughed. Thank you
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Amateurs, I've been brooding for years!
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Gotta be AI bullshit. But I'm reading it as, group A never stopped while group B stopped breeding at the end of the period.
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Hope they can get it to mass production. I have some bees in the area and would love to help the little guys.
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QUICK. What flowers produce pollen high in Sterol.
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Let it bee know they need sterol!
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I am expecting the Trump Regime to take this miracle and use it to raise Murder Hornet colonies or something.
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Genetically engineered to be attracted to minorities and immigrants
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Fun facts: "killer bees" are also known as "africanized bees". In the 1970s there was great alarm in the US about the spread of africanized bee strains because they're so much more aggressive than European bees. There was even a terrible horror movie about it, but this particular catastrophe never materialized. I had a friend in graduate school in the '90s who was part of a team of scientists investigating the problem. It turns out that if you raise an africanized queen in a temperate climate, the bees she produces are no more aggressive than European bees; likewise, a European queen raised in a hot, tropical climate produces bees just as hyper-aggressive as typical africanized bees. So the entire thing was just bee racism all along. Bracism?
Of course global heating is going to make this a bigger problem everywhere, but fortunately we'll be fucked a lot worse by all the other problems this is going to produce.
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And issue an executive order renaming the European Honey Bee to the American Honey Bee.
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Shhhh don't tell them about Italian bees. I want to start a hive when I buy a place. If they know about them they'll surely try to kill them off somehow
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Bigly bees. The best.
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Oh, Trump will definitely cook up some "emergency" as an excuse to stay in power.
Stop giving him ideas.
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Rfj jr will ban the substance for being synthetic and not a natural remedy
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TL;DR: They found six sterols found in pollen could be produced from engineered yeast and increased brood production dramatically. The article talks about them as essential nutrients but is it possible they are signaling molecules affecting bee behavior?
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Your second sentence is your own thoughts, not part of the tldr summary, right? I think you should make that separation clear (in Wikipedia terms, I'm flagging this as "original research").
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Yes, it was. I could add a paragraph break by editing.
But I won't.
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"Oh, so we can kill 15 times more before it becomes an issue" - Monsanto, probably
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And then goes on to kill 30 times more.
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Um, isn't this like majorly good news? Like maybe among our most important discoveries?
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The whole "save the bees" thing is about wild bees, not domesticated ones I think
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And the problem isn't just bees either. Broadly, insect populations are in free-fall. There are many stretches of highway in the US now where you don't need to clean your windshield after hours on the road. We've lost a massive chunk of our flying pollinator population, to say nothing of the roles they play in the food chains.
Massive-scale farming and pesticide use is going to leave us starving, ironically enough.
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This isn't true. Colony collapse disorder has been a big problem for beekeepers.
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Good for bee keepers, but most plants are pollinated by wild bees. So this could help, but doesn't really change much in the grand scheme.
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Nobel Prize in all categories.
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Yes. Very good news.
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For honey producers. This isn't going to help our ecosystem broadly.
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What if we just stopped stealing their honey?
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It's not the honey that produces the nutrient.
The nutrient comes from a plant and climate change is probably altering plant biology to make this nutrient harder to come by. Not to mention the supplemental feed given to bees late fall through early spring (a period where honey harvests have ceased) probably lacked that nutrient.
So, not harvesting honey wouldn't be the answer. Honey bees have been apart of the agricultural process for thousands of years (honey was harvested as far back as ancient Egypt and was used in the mummification process). So, if we stopped honey harvesting, it would be detrimental to both bees and the agricultural system.
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Debatable if it is considered stealing as beekeepers usually care of the bees, monitor possible diseases, and keep them from harm by providing suitable shelter.
How about we change the harvesting methods to be more bee-friendly.
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In a standard bee hive setup you don't even extract honey from for over a year. You have to ensure a population that is high and only take when there would be abundance. It would be counter productive to extract too much honey because it makes their population not grow as fast, and therefore end in lower honey production. I doubt bee farmers are trying to get less honey.
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Lol wut. Most honey today means killing all the bees every season and buying a new batch from the breeders the next season.
They don't "take care" of the bees any more than a butcher "takes care" of their pigs
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Do you have any idea how hard it is to milk each and every bee.
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I prefer to milk sugar canes.
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This is the most uplifting science article I’ve read in a while. The process they describe in the article sounds long and involved with many dependent steps. Great work!
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This is the most uplifting science article I’ve read in a while.
Adding into the "not really" chorus here.
The real problem isn't just honeybees, and in fact honeybees make a percentage of all actual wild pollination, and the leaders in the wild ecosystems are beetles and flies, which are dying off so rapidly that you can drive cross-country in many parts of the US now without needing to clean your windshields.
Insects broadly are in massive decline due to wide scale pesticide by agriculture and neighborhood pest control. We can't make up for this difference with honeybees.
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As I wrote in response to the not really view, I’m deeply pessimistic about the future, and the hope that I appreciate here is only for slightly extending agricultural yields so that I can keep eating cheap food for a few more years. Overall, we’re all fucked. I guess I’m not allowed to celebrate one bright spot in the enclosing darkness, thanks.
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Until you realize that wild bees and insects won't receive that food but the cause of their detriment won't be adjusted because we now have enough bees to pollinate the fruits on the farms.
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I do love native plants and I will deeply mourn the mass extinction of the Anthropocene. You’re not wrong.
But I was choosing the bright side here. It’s a lovely contrast to the destruction of NASA, the NSF, and all the trickle down effects in the science world. This bee work is delightfully from the UK and will be harder to cancel. It will help agriculture keep up with exponential human growth amid climate change and water overuse for slightly longer than it would last otherwise. I’m deeply pessimistic, but the bee thing is a little hopeful, ok?
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I thought that honeybees were the last bees that we should be saving since they harm native bee populations, which are move vulnerable.
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The European honeybee in the Americas is kinda a double edged sword. It's an invasive species, which both steals resources from and spreads diseases to native bees. However, for better or worse at this point a good portion of agriculture is dependent upon the European honey bee.
... And they produce honey, which I like.
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It's probably useful for other types of bees too.
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I thought the reason they die was pollution. I'm confused at why some new nutrient would save them.
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There's a lot of problems bees (both honey bee and native bees) are facing. There's varroa mite, a virus spread by mites, pesticides, pollution, habitat loss, monoculture... a lot of stuff. However, healthy bees are more resilient, so healthy hive is much more likely to shrug off a event that could be "the straw that broke the camels back" for a weakened malnourished hive.
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subscribe to more bee facts!
(long as you leave seinfeld out of this)
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They die for a variety of reasons, including disease, pollution, heat waves, etc. Not being half starved of essential nutrients means that they're more resilient.
From the article:
[Unaffiliated expert] said: "[...] bees face many stressors. Good nutrition is one way to improve their resilience to these threats, and in landscapes with dwindling natural forage for bees, a more complete diet supplement could be a game changer. This breakthrough discovery of key phytonutrients that, when included in feed supplements, allow sustained honey bee brood rearing has immense potential to improve outcomes for colony survival, and in turn the beekeeping businesses we rely on for our food production."
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I expect there are dozens of different things that influence how well a hive does, some good, some bad. Maybe having better nutrition overpowers the effect of pesticides, varroa mites, etc.
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I doubt such distilled diet would suffice/be benificial in the long run but maybe see it as rations whilst banning pesticide and create more diverse flora ecosystems. That might bee life-saving for mans best insect friend.
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Ma called, the bees are back!
96 comments
It’s the bees needs.