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.
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.