This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Several bee factions see this as a vaccine and are opting out. /s
The solution is so simple. Crop/pollen diversity. Instead of letting fields lay fallow for crop rotation, they could plant diverse wildflower meadows to improve quality of bee health for the traveling bees that get shipped around for crop rotation. Or the bee keepers themselves that sell the services of their bees, could ensure diverse flower and pollen options when their bees aren't traveling.
Get outta here with your sensible, practical solutions! ;-)
Seems easier than engineering edible yeast to get them the sterols they need.
Note for those passing through and not reading articles:
This is not a summary of the article, but OP's suggestion for a solution. The article talks about creating a yeast product that's lacking in bees' diet due to climate change and a lack of diversity in flowers.
OP suggests combatting the effects climate change has on biodiversity by planting your own diverse flowers. Which may work, or climate change may just kill those too.
Instead of letting fields lay fallow for crop rotation, they could plant diverse wildflower meadows to improve quality of bee health for the traveling bees that get shipped around for crop rotation.
I can see a potential problem with this suggestion. How many of those wildflowers are net nitrogen fixers? If they are net-negative this approach could be draining all the nitrogen out of the soil during off-rotation years meaning large amounts of petrochemical fertilizer would have to be used to make the field productive again for nitrogen consuming crops (like wheat and corn).
Key Native Nitrogen-Fixing Wildflowers:
https://edgeofthewoodsnursery.com/wp-content/uploads/Native-Plants-for-Nitrogen-Fixation.pdf
Cheers
Get rid of the large swaths of green fucking grass, which completely useless when one cuts it down. Let the Dandy Lions grow like we do in Europe and plant more native flowers too.
Clover. Clover is great:
+1 for clover. I "accidentally" spilled some clover seed outside our place (bugger off HOA), and it's slowly overtaking the grass they planted.
I spread a bunch of clover seed around my yard, and where the grass was struggling (I don’t water or fertilize at all) the clover took over, and where the grass was doing ok naturally the clover sort of let the grass have that space mostly. Now the whole yard looks nice, and the clover is just fucking loaded with bees all day. It’s great. My dog just lies in the lush clover and watches the bees buzz around.
Let the Dandy Lions grow like we do in Europe
No, Dandy Lions crowd out native North American species and result in less diverse ecosystems, which is bad.
I have a native meadow lawn and it's awesome. Zero maintenance, barely any watering (just peak dry season) and incredibly beautiful. The ecosystem takes care of itself as long as you don't buff one side by accident.
Spouse and I work every year to add native plants and flowers back around our host to give the bees a place to go. Anything to save these amazing, little polinaters.
And so the house of cards grows by another level. We'll just modify this to add this missing thing. Never mind why it is missing. 10 years later we are 9 layers deep on plugging holes we've created that technological advancements got us out if until they don't and whoosh the cards come crashing down. The hardiness of nature replaced by the frivolity of man.
I really wouldn't call nature "hardy" when an entire ecosystem can collapse when you can take one single species out of it
Let's remember that nature is what produced pandas
Though I still agree
I understand the sentiment and don't generally disagree... But in most places around the world, Western honeybees (apis mellifera) are an introduced, agricultural livestock, like cattle, and don't really belong in the natural ecosystem. This is akin to farmers providing grain feed to their cows; they don't have to exclusively rely on pasture grass which didn't evolve to withstand hundreds of hungry herbivores mowing them to the ground every day. Also, honeybees are mediocre pollinators for most native plants. If native bees don't have to compete for resources with honeybees, that's a good thing for both the native bees and the plants that coevolved with them.
This is both great and terrible. Great because "yay bees", terrible because now they have a synthetic stand in for a natural process which will almost certainly be misused
Instead of just PLANTING SOME FUCKING FLOWERS
In a couple years we'll be saying honey "doesn't taste like it used to"
Here in Germany farmers are payed for a strip of each field to be planted with wild flowers instead. They don't lose money at all and nature keeps a bit of land. Simple and cheap.
So they solved a problem we create ourselves, by destroying nature, by making a product that now increases the cost of food and makes farmers even more dependent on corporate chemical companies to grow it.
That is awesome news BUT
The real reason is humanity being a bunch of irresponsible greedy fuckwads, and I fear that this will be used not in the "let's be less greedy, let's fix the problems and let's use this to help the bees" but more as a "woohoo, bee factory farming!" and "W00T, this means we can fuck over bees even more, let's go!"
Can we please stop it with the greed?
Greed is incentivized both neurologically and economically. You cannot count on all of humanity rewiring their brain. We must destroy the economic incentives and then work on countering the neurological component.
This method is surprisingly effective at bringing back our god damn honey. We may not have to kill Nicolas Cage after all.
Soo, beekeepers thought for generations that bees (a animal too) only need sugar to live?
Beekeepers dont harvest the Pollen which the yeast is replacing. The lack of Pollen is most likelly a result of Monocultur.
"Scientists synthesize nutrients Bees no longer get because humans destroyed all the flowers, and we think this is a net good."
Don't be unnecessarily negative about this. The people trying to figure this out want to make things good again. Destroying the planet is easy. Fixing it is alot harder!
Yeah. That's unfortunate. An absolute travesty. But we've found a way to fix what we have fucked up. And that's good. Don't minimalize it.
We've broken the system. That sucks. But we've found a way to fix it for now. Not as good, but we are trying to do something.
Give some credit to the folks that are trying to fix our fuck ups. God damn it some people have realized what a mess we've made and are trying to do something to fix it. Small wins may just save our asses if we let them stack up enough.
It's possible to make things worse when attempting to solve a problem made by uncaring people. Making things better, temporarily, often gives them more time to continue to make things worse. Making things better this way also leads people at-large to believe they no longer need to take steps back away from disaster.
The way you're quoting this implies sarcasm or derision. Okay then, we should do nothing? The ecosystem is a wreck, yes, and acting our entire species took part is disingenuous at best.
I guess healthier hives would be less prone to winter die-off. Wonder what they feed the yeast on?
Bees
So they're feeding bees Vegemite now.
Do you want fat bees? Because this is how you get fat bees.
Ok~maybe I want fat bees.~
