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.
    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
      131·
      26 days ago

      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.

      • wizzor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        4·
        26 days ago

        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…

      • Agent641@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        26 days ago

        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