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.
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.