Engineered Yeast provides rare but essential pollen sterols for honeybees

Abstract

Honeybees are important crop pollinators, but they increasingly face pollen starvation as a result of agricultural intensification and climate change1. Frequent flowering dearth periods and high-density rearing conditions weaken colonies, which often leads to their demise2. Beekeepers provide colonies with pollen substitutes, but these feeds do not sustain brood production because they lack essential sterols found in pollen3,4. Here we describe a technological advance in honeybee nutrition with wide-reaching impacts on global food security. We first measured the quantity and proportion of sterols present in honeybee tissues. Using this information, we genetically engineered a strain of the oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica to produce a mixture of essential sterols for bees and incorporated this yeast strain into an otherwise nutritionally complete diet. Colonies exclusively fed with this diet reared brood for significantly longer than those fed diets without suitable sterols. The use of this method to incorporate sterol supplements into pollen substitutes will enable honeybee colonies to produce brood in the absence of floral pollen. Optimized diets created using this yeast strain could also reduce competition between bee species for access to natural floral resources and stem the decline in wild bee populations.

This is good to hear. We are native wild bee supporters, with various amenities in our yard to help bees - dead wood, sunny bare patches of permeable soil, a shallow water basin with pebbles (they like to have pebbles to land on), piles of old stems, native wildflowers, no chems. One thing I've noticed when nectar is scarce is bees sucking up juice from rotting fruit bits - this is actually not good for them, as fruit juices are not as nutritive for bees (wasps do better with that stuff). So you've got me wondering if this yeast supplement could be sprinkled on the fruit bits, when nothing is flowering - especially in drought years. It obviously wouldn't make up for a pollen shortfall, but it might help through lean times.

3 hours ago, TheVat said:

So you've got me wondering if this yeast supplement could be sprinkled on the fruit bits, when nothing is flowering - especially in drought years. It obviously wouldn't make up for a pollen shortfall, but it might help through lean times.

Adding 20% yeast biomass to existing artificial bee feed formulations is a complete diet apparently. A major benefit is that feeding domestcated bees on this not only greatly increases their brood raising performance, but also removes their reliance on natural pollen allowing native wild bee species to flourish also.