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.
This is the most uplifting science article I’ve read in a while. The process they describe in the article sounds long and involved with many dependent steps. Great work!
Adding into the “not really” chorus here.
The real problem isn’t just honeybees, and in fact honeybees make a percentage of all actual wild pollination, and the leaders in the wild ecosystems are beetles and flies, which are dying off so rapidly that you can drive cross-country in many parts of the US now without needing to clean your windshields.
Insects broadly are in massive decline due to wide scale pesticide by agriculture and neighborhood pest control. We can’t make up for this difference with honeybees.
As I wrote in response to the not really view, I’m deeply pessimistic about the future, and the hope that I appreciate here is only for slightly extending agricultural yields so that I can keep eating cheap food for a few more years. Overall, we’re all fucked. I guess I’m not allowed to celebrate one bright spot in the enclosing darkness, thanks.
Celebrate or doomer whatever you want, but a lot of us who still do care about larger things still want to do what we can to mitigate damage, and stories like this one are more damaging than beneficial to that cause. I would encourage finding a middle-ground between hopeless despair and “celebration” about anything.
People only read headlines and stories like this gain traction because it makes people think they don’t need to care about something anymore, and our species is profoundly lazy and eager to stop worrying about even existential threats to their own existence.
There’s nothing bad whatsoever about a breakthrough discovery allowing for essentially nutritionally-complete synthetic pollen. It’s all positive, full stop. The negatives you want to emphasize are that it doesn’t also solve other related problems. I never said that it did, only that it was the most uplifting science story in a long time. I read the whole dammed article, not just the headline, and I was very happy to have it get into a lot of details.
Feel free to have your middling reaction without celebration. I’m excited to have a positive science story I can discuss with my kids, and I’m sticking to that.
k
Until you realize that wild bees and insects won’t receive that food but the cause of their detriment won’t be adjusted because we now have enough bees to pollinate the fruits on the farms.
I do love native plants and I will deeply mourn the mass extinction of the Anthropocene. You’re not wrong.
But I was choosing the bright side here. It’s a lovely contrast to the destruction of NASA, the NSF, and all the trickle down effects in the science world. This bee work is delightfully from the UK and will be harder to cancel. It will help agriculture keep up with exponential human growth amid climate change and water overuse for slightly longer than it would last otherwise. I’m deeply pessimistic, but the bee thing is a little hopeful, ok?
very ok