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[–] 236 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

Sterols. Lipids found in pollen. Specifically, yeast enriched with sterols.

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  • [–] 91 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Doing great work. Thanks.

    And of course! Sterols! What I've been saying all along!

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    carols, what I've been singing all along

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Casseroles, what I've been eating all along

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  • [–] 75 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Colonies fed with the enriched diet were more likely to continue rearing brood up to the end of the three-month period, whereas colonies on sterol-deficient diets ceased brood production after 90 days.

    Uhh m not crazy right, that's the same thing?

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  • [–] 75 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I’m with you, it’s confusing. But I think what it means is this:

    The study ran for 90 days. Non-sterol bees had stopped doing bee sex by then. Sterol bees were doin it all the way up to the end of the 90 days - and then the study ended. We can therefore assume they wanted to continue having freaky beedsm sex for even longer.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago

    one group continued to the end of the study period, the other group had stopped by the same time

    or, one group stopped doing a thing, and the other group didn't show signs of stopping

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Gotta be AI bullshit. But I'm reading it as, group A never stopped while group B stopped breeding at the end of the period.

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  • [–] 50 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    In the new study, the research team succeeded in engineering the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica to produce a precise mixture of six key sterols that bees need. This was then incorporated into diets fed to bee colonies during three-month feeding trials. These took place in enclosed glasshouses to ensure the bees only fed on the treatment diets.

    Key findings:

    • By the end of the study period, colonies fed with the sterol-enriched yeast had reared up to 15 times more larvae to the viable pupal stage, compared with colonies fed control diets.
    • Colonies fed with the enriched diet were more likely to continue rearing brood up to the end of the three-month period, whereas colonies on sterol-deficient diets ceased brood production after 90 days.
    • Notably, the sterol profile of larvae in colonies fed the engineered yeast matched that found in naturally foraged colonies, suggesting that bees selectively transfer only the most biologically important sterols to their young.
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  • [–] 46 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    For anyone wanting to save the bees, look into making bee hotels. If you have a power drill and a variety of small bits, easy money. Spend a half hour watching videos, not too much to learn. They're basically free to make if you can lay your hands on some wood or non pressure-treated lumber. Chunk the old one every year and roll an new one.

    Damned cool when you see your first guests having waxed off the entrance hole!

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago

    I researched that, maybe it's just in Australia but apparently the bees here don't use those bee hotels? They apparently just get stacked with earwigs. I read the best thing you can do for bees here is plant native flowering plants like the Bottle Brush, and let leaves biodegrade naturally instead of hoovering em up.

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  • [+] 8 points 1 year ago* (1 child)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Also please check whether honey bees are native in your area. If they're not (or if there's too many of them) it leads to decline of other bee species and threatens other pollinators and rare plant species.

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    Well this story is the bee's needs!

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Um, isn't this like majorly good news? Like maybe among our most important discoveries?

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago

    Sorta. If you're a beekeeper I can see this being a major deal. Not clear on how hard this yeast is to grow or how well the process scales.

    Bees got a threefold problem, and we need to get at the roots of the issue.

    • Pesticides and herbicides. Won't happen, but governments need to ban these products for consumers, restrict them to professionals. Karen and Ken don't need a perfect lawn sacrificing the bottom of the food chain.

    • We need to grow more, and more indigenous, plants of all kinds. Working on it in my yard, doing well so far. Last year the bumblebees were so loud I thought it was construction on the next block over. :)

    • Verona mites are a monster issue. They came to America in the 90s and are whipping our ass. Haven't looked into beekeeping for awhile, not sure where we're at with that.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The whole "save the bees" thing is about wild bees, not domesticated ones I think

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    This isn't true. Colony collapse disorder has been a big problem for beekeepers.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Though interesting they've been staving it off rather directly; you have millions of colonies die, but you can breed millions more per year to keep the population stable. It is more expensive, and a bit dark for the bees.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago

    It’s the bees needs.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    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!

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  • [+] 4 points 1 year ago* (5 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [+] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (1 child)
    [–] 44 points 1 year ago

    Allow native wild flowers and plants to grow and get rid of the damn grass.

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  • [–] 61 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    TL;DR: They found six sterols found in pollen could be produced from engineered yeast and increased brood production dramatically. The article talks about them as essential nutrients but is it possible they are signaling molecules affecting bee behavior?

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    "Oh, so we can kill 15 times more before it becomes an issue" - Monsanto, probably

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    I thought that honeybees were the last bees that we should be saving since they harm native bee populations, which are move vulnerable.

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  • [–] [S] 17 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    The European honeybee in the Americas is kinda a double edged sword. It's an invasive species, which both steals resources from and spreads diseases to native bees. However, for better or worse at this point a good portion of agriculture is dependent upon the European honey bee.

    ... And they produce honey, which I like.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Capitalism. I should have known. Thanks for the context!

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    ....how do you arrive at Capitalism from "a good portion of our agriculture"?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Simple. A good portion of our agriculture is based on capitalism. Prior to the industrial revolution (capitalism) there weren't nation sized monoculture farms full of identical genetic freakshow plants.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I thought the reason they die was pollution. I'm confused at why some new nutrient would save them.

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  • [–] [S] 22 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    There's a lot of problems bees (both honey bee and native bees) are facing. There's varroa mite, a virus spread by mites, pesticides, pollution, habitat loss, monoculture... a lot of stuff. However, healthy bees are more resilient, so healthy hive is much more likely to shrug off a event that could be "the straw that broke the camels back" for a weakened malnourished hive.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago

    They die for a variety of reasons, including disease, pollution, heat waves, etc. Not being half starved of essential nutrients means that they're more resilient.

    From the article:

    [Unaffiliated expert] said: "[...] bees face many stressors. Good nutrition is one way to improve their resilience to these threats, and in landscapes with dwindling natural forage for bees, a more complete diet supplement could be a game changer. This breakthrough discovery of key phytonutrients that, when included in feed supplements, allow sustained honey bee brood rearing has immense potential to improve outcomes for colony survival, and in turn the beekeeping businesses we rely on for our food production."

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    I expect there are dozens of different things that influence how well a hive does, some good, some bad. Maybe having better nutrition overpowers the effect of pesticides, varroa mites, etc.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    Hope they can get it to mass production. I have some bees in the area and would love to help the little guys.

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  • [–] 34 points 1 year ago (17 children)

    I am expecting the Trump Regime to take this miracle and use it to raise Murder Hornet colonies or something.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Genetically engineered to be attracted to minorities and immigrants

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago* (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    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...

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  • [+] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    QUICK. What flowers produce pollen high in Sterol.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Let it bee know they need sterol!

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  • I doubt such distilled diet would suffice/be benificial in the long run but maybe see it as rations whilst banning pesticide and create more diverse flora ecosystems. That might bee life-saving for mans best insect friend.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Just a comment.... Its spring and my car is covered in tree pollen... Could some hungry bees please go clean that stuff up? People's allergies are kicking in.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)
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