Bee colonies grew 15-fold on diet supplemented diet with missing nutrients

2 stevenjgarner 1 8/24/2025, 6:06:30 PM nature.com ↗

Comments (1)

stevenjgarner · 2h ago
Researchers at Oxford and collaborators engineered yeast to produce six essential sterols found in pollen, creating a nutritionally complete bee supplement that boosted colony reproduction up to 15-fold and could help reverse honeybee population decline.

Can this synthetic sterol-enriched diet be successfully scaled and adopted in real-world beekeeping to not only improve colony survival but also reduce competition with wild pollinators and strengthen global food security?