Scientists make ‘superfood’ that could save honeybees

Scientists have developed a honeybee “superfood” that can protect animals from the dangers of climate change and housing losses.

Bee colonies ate the supplement during tests, with 15 times more children to bees to adulthood.

Honeybey is an important part of food production and contributes to 70% pollination of major global crops.

“This technical success needs to survive all nutrients, which means that we can continue to feed them when there is not enough pollen.”

“This is really a very big achievement,” she says.

Honeybey is facing a severe decline globally due to nutrient deficiencies, viral diseases, climate change and other factors. In the US, the annual colony disadvantages in the last decade are between 40–50% and are expected to grow.

Beekeepers in Britain have also faced serious challenges.

Nick Menasikov, president of the Cardiff, Well and Wallace Bikirs Association, told BBC News that he had lost 75% of its colonies in the last winter and has been seen in South Wales.

“Although the urticaries are filled with all food, bees have just reduced. Most of the bees survived through January, February, and then they simply disappeared,” they say.

Honeybees eat pollen and nectar from flowers, including nutrients, including lipids, called sterols that are essential for their development.

They make honey in urticaria, which become their food source in winter when flowers have stopped production of pollen.

When beekeepers extract honey to sell, or, rapidly, when enough pollen is not available, they give insect supplements.

But that food is made of protein flour, sugar and water, and always lacks nutrients requires bees. It is like humans eating diet without carbohydrates, amino acids, or other important nutrients.

Sterol has always proved to be very difficult for construction, but Prof. Wright has led a group of scientists for 15 years to find out that the exact sterols require bees and how they are engineered.

At the lab in Oxford, PhD student Jennifer Chennnels showed us small clear boxes of honeybees in an incubator, which she feeds with different foods.

She uses kitchen equipment that you can find at home to make raw materials, and roll the white tubes of the bright, white tubes.

“We put the ingredients like a cookie flour, with different protein, fats, different amounts of carbohydrates, and what is with micronutrients requiring bees.

She pushes the tubes inside the boxes and the bees are muddy in the mixture.

It is in this lab that, using gene editing, Pro Right’s team successfully created a yeast that can produce six sterols that require bees.

“This is a big success. When my student was able to engineer the yeast to make sterols, he sent me a picture of chromatogram which was a result of the work,” she says, referring to a chart of matter structure.

“I am still on my office wall,” she says.

“Superfood” was fed to bees in the labs of the lab for three months.

The results showed that the colonies had fed food, with 15 times more children bees that made it for adulthood.

“When bees have a complete nutrition, they should be healthy and less susceptible to the disease,” is called Pro Right.

Pro Wright says that food will be particularly useful during such summer when flowering plants have stopped production quickly.

“This is actually important in years when the heat comes quickly and the bees will not have enough pollen and nectar to make it through winter,” she says.

“More months that they go without pollen, the greater nutritional stress that they will cope, meaning that beekeepers will suffer more damage to those bees in winter,” she explains.

Massive tests are now required to assess the long -term effects of food on Honeyibi Health, but the supplement can be available to beekeepers and farmers within two years.

The study was led by the University of Oxford, which was working with the Royal Botanic Garden Kev, the University of Greenwich and Denmark Technical University.

The research is published in Journal Nature.