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.
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’m trying man.
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 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 :)
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.