Using CRISPR-Cas9, scientists engineered a yeast to produce the nutrient feed. Farmers could have it in two years.
Soo, beekeepers thought for generations that bees (a animal too) only need sugar to live?
Why can’t they just be easy to exploit gosh darn it
Beekeepers dont harvest the Pollen which the yeast is replacing. The lack of Pollen is most likelly a result of Monocultur.
I guess healthier hives would be less prone to winter die-off. Wonder what they feed the yeast on?
Bees
That’s the tradeoff, it’s bees /s
Soylent bee.
Under rated comment.
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.
Something like this already happened when we traded the long-term health and fertility of the topsoil for the immediate high yield output of artificially fertilized crops.
By outsourcing the repleneshment of fertility to the relatively fragile and unreliable supply chains and social organisations of man, we assumed management over a delicate balance which previously belonged to nature.
I’m not arguing against industrial agriculture and its commodification of fertiliser by the way. If carefully managed it’s possible to imagine an endpoint of equilibrium where global supply chains increase total system fertility by selectively resting soil and relying more on imports to then switch once local fertility peaks and so on. Really just sane market and unmolested market forces should in theory discover such a negotiated endpoint.
Fertility alone is not descriptive enough to capture, say, the importance of biological diversity or the load bearing capacity of local environments to support ecosystems, while also producing exportable outputs suitable for maintaining population growth in humanity.
Perennial crops are also ridiculously underused in overall food supply chains. They are more difficult to monetize in existing commodity forms because their overall system value is not captured numerically.
I don’t have an overall solution, but any solution will require at its core a way to assign value to the work which nature already does to replenish its own local fertility and to price that effect very cautiously in such a way that it becomes cheaper for intensive producers to rest unfertile soil until it becomes fertile than it is to compensate for unproductive soil by importing chemical fertiliser from somewhere else
Perennial crops are also ridiculously underused in overall food supply chains. They are more difficult to monetize in existing commodity forms because their overall system value is not captured numerically.
I think it probably has something to do with this:
(Source for the drawing: my ass)
As plants reach maturity, there’s less additional biomass accumulated year after year. At least that’s how i imagine it, based on animal growth. Like for cattle that’s true. They grow and after 6 months i think they already have like 50% of the weight of a grown-up animal? And if you let them grow for 10 years, they would only have twice the weight than after 6 months but you pay 20x the cost to keep them alive so it doesn’t pay off at all. That’s why they’re slaughtered early. I suspect a similar reason applies to plants and why they are eaten early.
Also, managed woods.
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.
In general we have a pretty misguided view of bees. In reality, very few bee species are social animals, despite popular belief. The idea of queen bees and beehives is so embedded in our culture.
Throughout history the human population has only been able to increase thanks to innovation. Irrigation, the wheel, alternating crops, crop distance, keeping disease in check, genetic engineering to increase resistance and crop yields, and this is another innovation in that line. If you want to go back to nature, by all means do.
I believe the only way forward is through science and innovation and if that means genetically altered food for the bees, then so be it. This with the in combination with limiting roundup should bring the global bee populations back from the brink.
You’re quickly glossing over all the issues.
“human population has only been able to increase thanks to innovation”: and that’s a good thing? What would be wrong with a more manageable human population?
“If you want to go back to nature, by all means do.”: how? The world has advanced beyond that, it’s clearly not an option.
“the only way forward is through science and innovation”: if science & innovation is what you call forward, then obviously yes, but that’s just a tautology. What is your measure of “forward”? If it’s power over nature, advancements, … then for sure. If it’s respecting this earth and not long term ruining the entire planet… how sure are you about that?
“limiting roundup”: ah, an innovation that should be limited. What went wrong that it was globally used before we were sure enough about its side effects? How sure are you about all the current innovations that they don’t have similar issues? How sure are you about this bee superfood not having disastrous long term effects?
If you ignore all the issues with it though, innovation is incredible for sure!
I would argue the right direction to go forward in is the direction where Billions of People dont starve. Innovation and sustainabillity are not mutually exclusive.
I’m all for this innovation if it means commercial bee farmers use the supplement and it helps native bees compete for natural pollen. People get very sentimental about honeybees, but honestly even as a hobbyist with just a few colonies I feel like a “baddie”. There are 200+ species of bees in the UK, most living in tiny colonies. At the moment bumblebee queens are out foraging for pollen and nectar, enough so they can start laying (only the queens live through winter). In my hives the overwintered workers are also out foraging, thousands of them. Multiply that by the hundreds of hives in a commercial operation and you can see the issue.
Welcome to 8 billion people and growing.
Wow, you are very stupid.
Fuck off.
I’m interested in your opinion, but can you like maybe not just post a personal attack, and explain why you think what the guy you replied to is stupid?
From my experience, what he describes really reflects what we see happening in the world all the time. layers of layers of us causing issues, and then solving them with more technologies, creating new problems, etc… etc… etc…
And the big bet is that we’re not digging ourselves into a very deep hole. In the end, the existential threat of global warming is one of the examples. We kept solving problems with burning more & more burning of fossil fuels, and then suddenly “o crap”.
dude… no
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.
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.
I dont think this is very true. How do you explain that 99.99% of people are super happy living their lives with just enough money to have somewhere to live and pay for food and some vehicle?
To me it seems that we have like 0.0001% of the population being super greedy and mentally ill, and they are the ones being talked about in the media and the ones turning Earth into a shitty place because of their enormous greed and lust for power.
How do you explain that 99.99% of people are super happy living their lives with just enough money to have somewhere to live and pay for food and some vehicle?
Further, how do you explain that, for most of human history, we haven’t lived in economic systems that reward greed in the way Capitalism does? Saying human beings are neurologically wired to behave in an especially greedy way, under Capitalism, is just recency bias.
Is that urge extent in people? Sure, but so are kindness, generosity, and plenty of other traits that run counter to greed and selfishness. To say that the negative ones incentivized by the economic system we live in are somehow more natural than those others, is nonsense.
I doubt we can remove the neurological component, let alone without it fucking up. Greed is an abstraction of our old survival instincts since as a general rule the tribe, clan, village or whatever would counter the worst effects. The end goal should be to reimplement those social control mechanisms, what that looks like is probably regulation’s and maybe beating some folks over the head with a 2x4.
Maybe we can steer the neurological component to focus on activity that offers positive benefits to society, like art. Substitute something good for something bad. It just takes a bit of time for the brain to find the satisfaction it used to get from greed in a different behavior, like music, or exercise.
We can always gun for glory through selfless action, still selfish reasons but good results.
explain how one would we or us stop it with the greed
It’s a bit extreme, but I say we kill all billionaires and then fairly redistribute their cash and see what happens.
If there’s no real change in greed then kill the top 0.1% of wealth hoarders and see what happens.At some point the greed will have to stop.
Bioengineer some humans to not be greedy.
Some humans because you can opt out, or you can choose it for your designer baby. Then there is a control and an experimental group.
The mad scientist in me is dying to see whether behaviors with moral connotations (greed) confer an advantage for survival.
Eugenics, btw
Funny thing, seems like all the billionaires are all for eugenics.
In fact they are pro anything that brings them more wealth and power whether it be destroying the planet or destroying the human race (Thiel) or destroying the night sky (Musk)
licks fingers and wets eyebrows
Hahah! An unethical study to quantify the survival value of ethics! Isaac Newton would agree that experiments are a necessity!
An economst’s natural experiment, hehe! oh Adam Smith, when does self interest become greed?
Are you okay?
waow
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.
Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland will be demanding a percentage of the farmer’s crop because they saved the bees that pollinated it.
The GOOD news is that yeast doesn’t really respect property lines. Or quarantines. Or much of anything. That shit will spread organically easily enough. It will be a while, but now that the strain exists (and is being constantly refreshed with the corpro product) it should help all beast everywhere. Maybe beast will start farming it like ants do. Would be fun
So does Monsanto with their GMO crops and they successfully sue farmers for having it, whose farms were invaded by it. I don’t see it as good news when a company can’t control their IP. They’ll criminalize possession and use that to drive weak competitors out all together. These people are psychopaths.
That’s a lot easier to do with plants than single celled organisms.
Yep, you can’t charge money in perpetuity if you solve the actual problem. Not only that, but bees will eventually become reliant on the product. This is how the US Healthcare system works as well.
Thats also how fertillizer works. Honey Bees are domestic Animals and require care to be usefull to us.
Hell they might even genetically engineer them to be dependent on it.
Jem’Hadar bees, wonderful /s
I bet the bastards have already wondered
"Hmm, if this works maybe we can do all life on earth next . . ?
“We’ll make all the money!”
It’s exactly the way they said drug dealers would work
Yes but you see, now the solution is a product, and shareholders shall profit from its sale. Value where no value was before. Blessed be the capitalists.
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.
Works for me. I only mow early spring and early autumn. During spring and summer the yard runs on it’s own. Every year is different. Each year it looks different. Every year honey tast little different. But … that is how it’s supposed to be!
“brands” hate that, taste must be 100% predictable year to year. Just like wine. Grapes are different each year too. Imagine the amount of additives required to adjust (read that as ruin) the original flavor.
Get outta here with your sensible, practical solutions! ;-)
Seems easier than engineering edible yeast to get them the sterols they need.
In the end, it probably isn’t easier at all. Once the yeast is created, yeast is dirt cheap and easy as hell to grow, and wouldn’t require managing a field of wildflowers that are going to drop seeds for the following year when you intend to plant crops there. I’m not saying it’s a good or ethical choice, but the yeast definitely has the potential to be easier and cheaper
But you see they can sell this! Can’t sell “fallow fields”…
Yes well known fact we shouldn’t research any technology to reverse the collapse of our biosphere or to alleviate climate change. Wouldn’t want anyone being able to sell that tech. Best we just turn off the lights and plant some flowers.
I love planting some flowers, but we’re going to need technology to undo the mess we created.
Fellows can sell seeds for fallow fields, my friend. never fear for they will forage, and be fine.
Didn’t use fertile or follow or falter. Fine folly.
Frankly, foul folly feels fitter.
V, is that you?
“They” being the University of Oxford?
Plenty of companies have been founded by former university researchers based on discoveries they’ve made while at said universities. Seems like nothing prevents those folks from patenting the newfound methods for themselves.
Or, they will license the technology to a big manufacturer. Seeing as the University of Oxford is probably ill-equipped to produce industrial amounts of yeast.
But Brawndo has the electrolites that plants crave!
Just in case the joke is too far of a stretch to make the connection, what I’m saying is the obvious simple solution isn’t profitable.
They’d rather sell you a solution that doesn’t actually work, then give you a solution that works that they can’t make profit on.
So Brawndo for bees too? Done!
Who is “they” in this case
It also doesn’t degrade ecosystems further.
Bees aren’t just the domesticated honey bees.
Yeah, I found that pretty weird, too. Not only that, but you can’t get that yeast for the next two years. Your method works yesterday haha.
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:
- Lupines (Lupinus spp.): Includes Texas Bluebonnet and various perennial species; they thrive in poor soil and are loved by pollinators.
- Prairie Clover (Dalea spp.): Purple (Dalea purpurea) and White (Dalea candida) are drought-tolerant perennials that fix high levels of nitrogen.
- False Indigo (Baptisia spp.): Sturdy perennials with showy, pea-like flower spikes (e.g., Blue False Indigo).
- Partridge Pea (Chamaecrista fasciculata): An annual that grows rapidly, making it excellent for disturbed soils.
- Wild Senna (Senna hebecarpa): A tall perennial that produces yellow flowers.
- Canada Milkvetch (Astragalus canadensis): A hardy, native perennial.
- Groundnut (Apios americana): A vine-like wildflower with edible tubers.
https://edgeofthewoodsnursery.com/wp-content/uploads/Native-Plants-for-Nitrogen-Fixation.pdf
Cheers
Several of those are going to be perennial and end up competing with mono-culture crops the following year(s) (not that I’m trying to defend mono-culture crops, but that’s what they’re planting). It’s a good idea, but not necessarily as simple as you’re implying. Still it’s an idea that’s not without some merit. The biggest obstacle to adoption is no one is making a significant profit off of it, so it’s unlikely to see much uptake.
You aren’t wrong, but soil can be turned over, and the wildflowers can be removed.
What about the seeds they dropped the year prior
Bees went fucking nuts for my lupine, even while living in an urban environment. Only problem was that the aphids did too. So many that it was revolting. I had to aggressively remove them every single day of the colonies would explode and destroy my lupine within a very short time. They’d suck it dry.
I don’t mean to argue against flowers, but why specifically Pennsylvania? What about everywhere else?
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.
I re call watching Clarkson’s Farm and he was paid to grow wildflowers in one of the fields for these very reasons.
Yeah, the government subsidy for that was so high that it was more profitable than growing grain on the field (which is admittedly not hard, since he made a loss on his grain fields)
I learned during COVID about planting diverse local wildflowers to help with pollination in my small little garden I used to have. I ended up dedicating like an 8x6 planter just for wildflowers every year. Always had tons of bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies. I honestly never realized how many species of bees there were. The first year I did it I tripled my veggie yield, never looked back.
I’m sure things are different in different parts of the world, but where I’m from, pretty much none of the big crop farms let fields lay truly fallow. Most of them plant various cold season cover crops that include things like clover, brassicas, and legumes like vetch. Those all produce lots of flowers that feed the bees in the off season.
The issue with wildflower meadows, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that most of those wildflowers bloom at times when the fields would otherwise be needed for crop production. Of course, there are farmers who skip planting at all some years, but in my neck of the woods, nobody does that. They plant every year, at least once, they just rotate different crops in and out. Corn one year. Hay then soy, the next. And so on.
Bee extinction means no polination, no polination means no crops; penny wise and pound foolish.
Bee extinction means drastically fewer crops and less pollination, but not no crops. It would be devastating, but there would still be agriculture. Lots of staple crops are wind pollinated and don’t rely on insects at all. But for the rest of our food, that would all become very expensive and widely unavailable.
True but at the same time bees help spread pollinating plants - it’s a two way relationship. They may be commercialised for crops, but they will go to any plants in range and contribute to their spread.
So a method of increasing bee populations may also be helpful in spreading wildflowers and speeding up rewilding efforts.
In addition dramatically increasing bee populations may help resolve issues with pollination such as in some regions of China where damage is so bad that hand pollination is needed for crops. Restoring bee pollinators in those areas may increase crop yields, which in turn reduces the general pressure globally on expanding the use of fertile land for farming.
So while crop/pollen diversity is certainly very important, this kind of research still has potentially big benefits for the environment both in the fight to rewild and slow the spread of land use being moved to farming.
nah man. bees just crave brawndo.
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
Cuno doesn’t care. Cuno just wants cheap artificial honey.
In a couple years we’ll be saying honey “doesn’t taste like it used to”
Where I live, honey is labeled with the types of flowers that the bees were feeding on. I doubt that “yeast honey” is going to replace the “chestnut honey” any time soon.
But what flowers do we let growth that will make money ?
Its simple economics. No matter how beneficial it is to the environment, people, or the economy, its bad for the economy to do anything without a direct profit motive
(god I hope the sarcasm was thick enough)
Well, domestic bees are intrusive. I wonder if they are going to try to feed this to wild bees… Probably not. Still, I want domestic bees to flourish, because I like honey, so I’m not that mad.
I don’t like honey so the things I do will be 100% to support non-honey bees because they are far far far more valuable than invasive honey bees ever could be…e.
I love my native bees. Especially mason bees. I love that they can’t be commercialized. I hate that people don’t care about them because they can’t be commercialized and that’s the whole reason my yard is mostly wild.
Fuuuuuuuck honey and the damage it causes the natural ecosystem. Fuck importing plants and making them work through invasive agriculture. If something can’t grow because we can’t keep the bees here because they aren’t native here…. TOO FUCKING BAD! Import it, don’t ruin the ecosystem trying to make it work.
I’d bet my life savings you don’t actually feel this strongly about honey bees. And secondly, honey bees don’t need “invasive agriculture” to survive or produce honey. They produce honey just fine from natural wildflowers and wildflowers benefit all the same from pollination.
I feel that strongly about native bees and honey bees cause problems for them so… yeah. I’m big on native wildlife. Fuck invasive species.
Honeybees are not native where I am, and somehow we have so many crops that supposedly rely on them or they would fail entirely, how is that not invasive agriculture? People truck bees across the country to support these crops.
I’m not saying they can’t produce honey from native flowers, they can but that’s entirely beside the point, and that’s also competing with native bees, of which there are hundreds of species.
Do you want fat bees? Because this is how you get fat bees.
Ok~maybe I want fat bees.~
(courtesy of Murvyn)
Though what if honey bees are only so docile because they don’t have the energy to be assholes and this is the first step in a total bee world takeover?
Wonder if I would grow some extra inches, if I made bread out of this yeast?
Abstract: Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in pollen. In controlled trials, colonies fed this specially designed diet produced up to 15 times more young, showing a dramatic boost in reproduction and overall health. As climate change and modern agriculture reduce the availability of natural pollen, this innovation could offer a practical way to support struggling bee populations.
Does it work for all bee species or only the honeybee species we usually use for producing honey? Wild populations are getting fucked and, last I checked, outcompeted by invasive honeybees we keep introducing to new areas for increased honey production…
The article suggests that if the farmed honey bees get this engineered food, that would leave more wild forrage for native bees.
I suspect native bees would also benefit from eating it too.
Being married to a pollinator ecologist has taught me at least one thing: honeybees are overrated. Native bees are waaay cooler.
I’m glad the article said something about the impact to native bee populations, and I expect the same, but it would’ve been much nicer if the paper said something about them. For now we’re stuck with speculation…
Once we replace free ecosystem production with manmade solutions, the roi on life simply won’t be worth investing in. Capitalism is a death cult.
