Artificial superfood for bees boosts colony reproduction
Bees often find it difficult to obtain the nutrients they need flowers
Ran Zisovitch / Shutterstock
An artificial “supermarket” which provides essential nutrients to bees leads to colonies producing many more larvae, which suggests that this could help fight the world decline in bees.
Bees must eat pollen from a range of flowers to obtain the nutrients they need, including essential lipids called sterols. But due to climate change and industrial agriculture, the environments in which they live often do not have the floral diversity they need to survive. “We need more bees to do pollination for cultures, and there is less food for them,” said Geraldine Wright at the University of Oxford.
To remedy this, beekeepers are increasingly feeding the substitutes for artificial bee pollen. But commercial supplements – generally in protein flour, sugars and oils – do not have the right sterols, which makes them nutritionally incomplete.
Using the Crispr gene edition, Wright and his colleagues designed yeast Yarrowia lipolytica To produce a precise mixture of six key sterols that bees need. The yeast was incorporated into diets supplied with bee colonies during three -month -old food tests in closed glass houses.
At the end of the study, the colonies nourished with yeasts enriched by sterols had raised up to 15 times more larvae at the viable pupes stage, compared to the colonies which received a typical commercial food.
The colonies nourished with the regime enriched by the sterols were able to continue to produce eggs and larvae until the end of the period of 90 days, while the colonies under regimes deficient in sterol had largely stopped the production of brood before the end of the study.
“Our technology allows beekeepers to feed the bees in the absence of pollen,” explains Wright. “When they are incorporated into a pollen substitute which has been optimized for all other nutrients, bees will be healthier and produce stronger and more durable colonies.”
Breast could also be used to design essential nutrients for other breeding insects, which are increasingly important food sources for humans and livestock, explains Wright.
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