It’s the bees needs.
It has what bees crave!!
QUICK. What flowers produce pollen high in Sterol.
Let it bee know they need sterol!
Hope they can get it to mass production. I have some bees in the area and would love to help the little guys.
Allow native wild flowers and plants to grow and get rid of the damn grass.
Well this story is the bee’s needs!
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?
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.
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
Some were observed brooding for up to 12 weeks!
Amateurs, I’ve been brooding for years!
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.
Why in hell is poorly written text “AI bullshit” now? An LLM would probably write that in a clearer way.
Were articles irreprehensibly written up to 3 years ago?
Fuckin old men of Restelo!
For me it’s because the study is dated August 2025. Everything after November 2022 is suspect.
Sterols. Lipids found in pollen. Specifically, yeast enriched with sterols.
Doing great work. Thanks.
And of course! Sterols! What I’ve been saying all along!
carols, what I’ve been singing all along
Casseroles, what I’ve been eating all along
Florals, indeed! The shirts I always wear when I’m ready to attract some bees.
Heralds, they’ve carried my commands all along
I am expecting the Trump Regime to take this miracle and use it to raise Murder Hornet colonies or something.
And issue an executive order renaming the European Honey Bee to the American Honey Bee.
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
Bigly bees. The best.
Genetically engineered to be attracted to minorities and immigrants
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.
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.
I can confirm that - because I live in a temperate region rather close to where those bees started spreading, so we got them rather early. And yet the bees here aren’t specially aggressive or something like that, they will attack you if you mess with their hive but that’s it, odds are that non-hybrid European bees do the same.
I lived in the Southwest when the africanized bees arrived, and there was indeed a sharp increase in attacks, a couple deaths over a a number of years, a lot of pets getting attacked. Then people just moved on and people learned to not fuck around with hives.
I don’t know if it was the queens de-agressing in the new environment or public awareness or just media hype dying down, or all of the above, but yeah, it turned out to be the least of our actual worries in the 21st century.
Really? This is super interesting. I have been stressing out about when the swarms of murder bees reach me here in the north still in 2020s and you are telling me this is one of the few things I didn’t need to worry about…
You’re thinking of hornets, not bees.
No, I was definitely thinking about bees so…
Yay, new anxiety!
Nope, they’re just reacting to old news
And I also never heard that it was bracism all along. I always wondered why that faded from public consciousness
Which is scariest? Particularly brutal hornets or swarms of aggressive bees? One bad sting or uncountable stings?
No, no there was a lot of clickbait about this event in the media he’s referring to:
It was also found in the Pacific Northwest of North America in late 2019,[6][7] with a few more additional sightings in 2020,[8][9] and nests found in 2021,[10][11] prompting concern that it could become an invasive species,[12][Ala 1] but in December 2024, the species was announced to have been eradicated completely from the United States.[13]
Adricanized honey bee scare came back in the 2000s, didn’t it?
Anyway, we know the adricanized honey bees were a myth, but adricanized honey badgers are a real force to be reckoned with
adricanized
Really? three times?
deleted by creator
Oh, Trump will definitely cook up some “emergency” as an excuse to stay in power.
Stop giving him ideas.
Rfj jr will ban the substance for being synthetic and not a natural remedy
For anyone wanting to save the bees, look into making bee hotels. If you have a power drill and a variety of small bits, easy money. Spend a half hour watching videos, not too much to learn. They’re basically free to make if you can lay your hands on some wood or non pressure-treated lumber. Chunk the old one every year and roll an new one.
Damned cool when you see your first guests having waxed off the entrance hole!
We need more food and less pesticides for our bees more than houses for bees in the US.
No really, it’s really bad. Flowering seasons across much of the south and west have been reduced, farmland and pesticides everywhere, people don’t grow gardens in suburbs and everything is suburbs.
In the early 2000’s I could drive across country and have to stop at every gas station to clean my windshield. Now on the same exact route my windshield is almost spotless after 5 hours on the road. This is really, really bad. It’s not just bees, it’s everything.
Preaching to the choir. The windshield thing is what originally brought home the scope of this disaster. We travel from Florida to Tupelo several times a year. 700 mile round trip through the South, never had to clean bugs, not once. Imagine that.
I’m letting our yard go largely wild, and in any case we’ve loaded up with flowers. We have several tiny ponds, 15G-150G, that are all natural that are breeding frogs and dragonflies. They also act as mosquito traps because the fish and tadpoles, and hopefully dragonfly larva, eat the babies.
At our 2.5 acre camp in the boonies I’ve been trying to get flowers in there. Dumped a 5G bucket of crepe myrtle seeds last fall, not sure any took. LOL, mostly failing on that project. I want to get some hives going, but there just can’t be enough flowers around in most seasons.
I researched that, maybe it’s just in Australia but apparently the bees here don’t use those bee hotels? They apparently just get stacked with earwigs. I read the best thing you can do for bees here is plant native flowering plants like the Bottle Brush, and let leaves biodegrade naturally instead of hoovering em up.
Easy money? Do they pay rent?
*easy honey
take it
If you can collect. All I get are pollinated plants. YMMV.
Also, stop using pesticides/ herbicides in you garden, plant native flowering plants, mow after they finished flowering, let grass grow a bit, maybe mow alternating areas.
The only thing that may save some bees is the general laziness and apathy that most people have about the outdoors now. It won’t happen in the vast, vast stretches of HOA monitored hell that has sprawled across most of the USA, but at least in other neighborhoods I expect the people letting their yards overgrow will help a bit.
Still, everything gets washed in pesticides all the time. I don’t have high hopes for our ecosystem anymore.
Also please check whether honey bees are native in your area. If they’re not (or if there’s too many of them) it leads to decline of other bee species and threatens other pollinators and rare plant species.
Not sure what that has to do with my comment? Bee hotels are for solitary bees, not honey bees. Exactly what we want!
Yep, sorry. Still I kind of think it’s worth repeating over and over, so treat is as not aimed at you :)
In the new study, the research team succeeded in engineering the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica to produce a precise mixture of six key sterols that bees need. This was then incorporated into diets fed to bee colonies during three-month feeding trials. These took place in enclosed glasshouses to ensure the bees only fed on the treatment diets.
Key findings:
- By the end of the study period, colonies fed with the sterol-enriched yeast had reared up to 15 times more larvae to the viable pupal stage, compared with colonies fed control diets.
- 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.
- Notably, the sterol profile of larvae in colonies fed the engineered yeast matched that found in naturally foraged colonies, suggesting that bees selectively transfer only the most biologically important sterols to their young.
now I want some sterols
Behind the local McDonald’s at 5am…ask for one eyed sterol Joe. Tell him I sent you and thanks for the happy ending, it was real good.
“Oh, so we can kill 15 times more before it becomes an issue” - Monsanto, probably
This is also how profits and tax cuts work for the rich
And then goes on to kill 30 times more.
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?
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”).
Yes, it was. I could add a paragraph break by editing.
But I won’t.
Sterols are steroids
True. Sterols are a subset of steroids. I guess my question was what is the important function of those sterols in promoting progeny production?
Pretty sure you misread the article, it said pierogi production.
This is why bees are so important to our food supply.
also important
Um, isn’t this like majorly good news? Like maybe among our most important discoveries?
The whole “save the bees” thing is about wild bees, not domesticated ones I think
This isn’t true. Colony collapse disorder has been a big problem for beekeepers.
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.
Sorta. If you’re a beekeeper I can see this being a major deal. Not clear on how hard this yeast is to grow or how well the process scales.
Bees got a threefold problem, and we need to get at the roots of the issue.
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Pesticides and herbicides. Won’t happen, but governments need to ban these products for consumers, restrict them to professionals. Karen and Ken don’t need a perfect lawn sacrificing the bottom of the food chain.
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We need to grow more, and more indigenous, plants of all kinds. Working on it in my yard, doing well so far. Last year the bumblebees were so loud I thought it was construction on the next block over. :)
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Verona mites are a monster issue. They came to America in the 90s and are whipping our ass. Haven’t looked into beekeeping for awhile, not sure where we’re at with that.
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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.
Yes. Very good news.
For honey producers. This isn’t going to help our ecosystem broadly.
Nobel Prize in all categories.
