Scientists found the missing nutrients bees need

It’s the bees needs.

It has what bees crave!!

Allow native wild flowers and plants to grow and get rid of the damn grass.

Well this story is the bee's needs!

QUICK. What flowers produce pollen high in Sterol.

Hope they can get it to mass production. I have some bees in the area and would love to help the little guys.

Colonies fed with the enriched diet were more likely to continue rearing brood up to the end of the three-month period, whereas colonies on sterol-deficient diets ceased brood production after 90 days.

Uhh m not crazy right, that's the same thing?

I’m with you, it’s confusing. But I think what it means is this:
The study ran for 90 days. Non-sterol bees had stopped doing bee sex by then. Sterol bees were doin it all the way up to the end of the 90 days - and then the study ended. We can therefore assume they wanted to continue having freaky beedsm sex for even longer.
- I could begrudgingly accept that, if that's what is it was
one group continued to the end of the study period, the other group had stopped by the same time
or, one group stopped doing a thing, and the other group didn't show signs of stopping
Some were observed brooding for up to 12 weeks!
- I laughed. Thank you
- Amateurs, I've been brooding for years!
Gotta be AI bullshit. But I'm reading it as, group A never stopped while group B stopped breeding at the end of the period.
- Why in hell is poorly written text "AI bullshit" now? An LLM would probably write that in a clearer way.
  Were articles irreprehensibly written up to 3 years ago?
  Fuckin old men of Restelo!

Let it bee know they need sterol!

Sterols. Lipids found in pollen. Specifically, yeast enriched with sterols.

Doing great work. Thanks.
And of course! Sterols! What I've been saying all along!
- carols, what I've been singing all along

In the new study, the research team succeeded in engineering the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica to produce a precise mixture of six key sterols that bees need. This was then incorporated into diets fed to bee colonies during three-month feeding trials. These took place in enclosed glasshouses to ensure the bees only fed on the treatment diets.

Key findings:

By the end of the study period, colonies fed with the sterol-enriched yeast had reared up to 15 times more larvae to the viable pupal stage, compared with colonies fed control diets.
Colonies fed with the enriched diet were more likely to continue rearing brood up to the end of the three-month period, whereas colonies on sterol-deficient diets ceased brood production after 90 days.
Notably, the sterol profile of larvae in colonies fed the engineered yeast matched that found in naturally foraged colonies, suggesting that bees selectively transfer only the most biologically important sterols to their young.

now I want some sterols
- Behind the local McDonald's at 5am...ask for one eyed sterol Joe. Tell him I sent you and thanks for the happy ending, it was real good.

For anyone wanting to save the bees, look into making bee hotels. If you have a power drill and a variety of small bits, easy money. Spend a half hour watching videos, not too much to learn. They're basically free to make if you can lay your hands on some wood or non pressure-treated lumber. Chunk the old one every year and roll an new one.

Damned cool when you see your first guests having waxed off the entrance hole!

We need more food and less pesticides for our bees more than houses for bees in the US.
No really, it's really bad. Flowering seasons across much of the south and west have been reduced, farmland and pesticides everywhere, people don't grow gardens in suburbs and everything is suburbs.
In the early 2000's I could drive across country and have to stop at every gas station to clean my windshield. Now on the same exact route my windshield is almost spotless after 5 hours on the road. This is really, really bad. It's not just bees, it's everything.
- Preaching to the choir. The windshield thing is what originally brought home the scope of this disaster. We travel from Florida to Tupelo several times a year. 700 mile round trip through the South, never had to clean bugs, not once. Imagine that.
  I'm letting our yard go largely wild, and in any case we've loaded up with flowers. We have several tiny ponds, 15G-150G, that are all natural that are breeding frogs and dragonflies. They also act as mosquito traps because the fish and tadpoles, and hopefully dragonfly larva, eat the babies.
  At our 2.5 acre camp in the boonies I've been trying to get flowers in there. Dumped a 5G bucket of crepe myrtle seeds last fall, not sure any took. LOL, mostly failing on that project. I want to get some hives going, but there just can't be enough flowers around in most seasons.
  I'm trying man.
I researched that, maybe it's just in Australia but apparently the bees here don't use those bee hotels? They apparently just get stacked with earwigs. I read the best thing you can do for bees here is plant native flowering plants like the Bottle Brush, and let leaves biodegrade naturally instead of hoovering em up.
Easy money? Do they pay rent?
- *easy honey
- If you can collect. All I get are pollinated plants. YMMV.
Also please check whether honey bees are native in your area. If they're not (or if there's too many of them) it leads to decline of other bee species and threatens other pollinators and rare plant species.
- Not sure what that has to do with my comment? Bee hotels are for solitary bees, not honey bees. Exactly what we want!
Also, stop using pesticides/ herbicides in you garden, plant native flowering plants, mow after they finished flowering, let grass grow a bit, maybe mow alternating areas.
- The only thing that may save some bees is the general laziness and apathy that most people have about the outdoors now. It won't happen in the vast, vast stretches of HOA monitored hell that has sprawled across most of the USA, but at least in other neighborhoods I expect the people letting their yards overgrow will help a bit.
  Still, everything gets washed in pesticides all the time. I don't have high hopes for our ecosystem anymore.

I am expecting the Trump Regime to take this miracle and use it to raise Murder Hornet colonies or something.

And issue an executive order renaming the European Honey Bee to the American Honey Bee.
- Shhhh don't tell them about Italian bees. I want to start a hive when I buy a place. If they know about them they'll surely try to kill them off somehow
Genetically engineered to be attracted to minorities and immigrants
- Fun facts: "killer bees" are also known as "africanized bees". In the 1970s there was great alarm in the US about the spread of africanized bee strains because they're so much more aggressive than European bees. There was even a terrible horror movie about it, but this particular catastrophe never materialized. I had a friend in graduate school in the '90s who was part of a team of scientists investigating the problem. It turns out that if you raise an africanized queen in a temperate climate, the bees she produces are no more aggressive than European bees; likewise, a European queen raised in a hot, tropical climate produces bees just as hyper-aggressive as typical africanized bees. So the entire thing was just bee racism all along. Bracism?
  Of course global heating is going to make this a bigger problem everywhere, but fortunately we'll be fucked a lot worse by all the other problems this is going to produce.
Bigly bees. The best.
Oh, Trump will definitely cook up some "emergency" as an excuse to stay in power.
Stop giving him ideas.
- Rfj jr will ban the substance for being synthetic and not a natural remedy

TL;DR: They found six sterols found in pollen could be produced from engineered yeast and increased brood production dramatically. The article talks about them as essential nutrients but is it possible they are signaling molecules affecting bee behavior?

Your second sentence is your own thoughts, not part of the tldr summary, right? I think you should make that separation clear (in Wikipedia terms, I'm flagging this as "original research").
- Yes, it was. I could add a paragraph break by editing.
  But I won't.
Sterols are steroids
- True. Sterols are a subset of steroids. I guess my question was what is the important function of those sterols in promoting progeny production?

"Oh, so we can kill 15 times more before it becomes an issue" - Monsanto, probably

And then goes on to kill 30 times more.
This is also how profits and tax cuts work for the rich

Um, isn't this like majorly good news? Like maybe among our most important discoveries?

Sorta. If you're a beekeeper I can see this being a major deal. Not clear on how hard this yeast is to grow or how well the process scales.
Bees got a threefold problem, and we need to get at the roots of the issue.
Pesticides and herbicides. Won't happen, but governments need to ban these products for consumers, restrict them to professionals. Karen and Ken don't need a perfect lawn sacrificing the bottom of the food chain.
We need to grow more, and more indigenous, plants of all kinds. Working on it in my yard, doing well so far. Last year the bumblebees were so loud I thought it was construction on the next block over. :)
Verona mites are a monster issue. They came to America in the 90s and are whipping our ass. Haven't looked into beekeeping for awhile, not sure where we're at with that.
The whole "save the bees" thing is about wild bees, not domesticated ones I think
- And the problem isn't just bees either. Broadly, insect populations are in free-fall. There are many stretches of highway in the US now where you don't need to clean your windshield after hours on the road. We've lost a massive chunk of our flying pollinator population, to say nothing of the roles they play in the food chains.
  Massive-scale farming and pesticide use is going to leave us starving, ironically enough.
- This isn't true. Colony collapse disorder has been a big problem for beekeepers.
Good for bee keepers, but most plants are pollinated by wild bees. So this could help, but doesn't really change much in the grand scheme.
Yes. Very good news.
- For honey producers. This isn't going to help our ecosystem broadly.
Nobel Prize in all categories.

This is the most uplifting science article I’ve read in a while. The process they describe in the article sounds long and involved with many dependent steps. Great work!

This is the most uplifting science article I’ve read in a while.
Adding into the "not really" chorus here.
The real problem isn't just honeybees, and in fact honeybees make a percentage of all actual wild pollination, and the leaders in the wild ecosystems are beetles and flies, which are dying off so rapidly that you can drive cross-country in many parts of the US now without needing to clean your windshields.
Insects broadly are in massive decline due to wide scale pesticide by agriculture and neighborhood pest control. We can't make up for this difference with honeybees.
- As I wrote in response to the not really view, I’m deeply pessimistic about the future, and the hope that I appreciate here is only for slightly extending agricultural yields so that I can keep eating cheap food for a few more years. Overall, we’re all fucked. I guess I’m not allowed to celebrate one bright spot in the enclosing darkness, thanks.
Until you realize that wild bees and insects won't receive that food but the cause of their detriment won't be adjusted because we now have enough bees to pollinate the fruits on the farms.
- I do love native plants and I will deeply mourn the mass extinction of the Anthropocene. You’re not wrong.
  But I was choosing the bright side here. It’s a lovely contrast to the destruction of NASA, the NSF, and all the trickle down effects in the science world. This bee work is delightfully from the UK and will be harder to cancel. It will help agriculture keep up with exponential human growth amid climate change and water overuse for slightly longer than it would last otherwise. I’m deeply pessimistic, but the bee thing is a little hopeful, ok?

I thought that honeybees were the last bees that we should be saving since they harm native bee populations, which are move vulnerable.

The European honeybee in the Americas is kinda a double edged sword. It's an invasive species, which both steals resources from and spreads diseases to native bees. However, for better or worse at this point a good portion of agriculture is dependent upon the European honey bee.
... And they produce honey, which I like.
- Capitalism. I should have known. Thanks for the context!
- Here's an idea...feed native bees this stuff as needed?
It's probably useful for other types of bees too.
I know it’s hard for some people to get their heads around, but there are literally dozens of places that aren’t in America.

I thought the reason they die was pollution. I'm confused at why some new nutrient would save them.

There's a lot of problems bees (both honey bee and native bees) are facing. There's varroa mite, a virus spread by mites, pesticides, pollution, habitat loss, monoculture... a lot of stuff. However, healthy bees are more resilient, so healthy hive is much more likely to shrug off a event that could be "the straw that broke the camels back" for a weakened malnourished hive.
- subscribe to more bee facts!
  (long as you leave seinfeld out of this)
They die for a variety of reasons, including disease, pollution, heat waves, etc. Not being half starved of essential nutrients means that they're more resilient.
From the article:
[Unaffiliated expert] said: "[...] bees face many stressors. Good nutrition is one way to improve their resilience to these threats, and in landscapes with dwindling natural forage for bees, a more complete diet supplement could be a game changer. This breakthrough discovery of key phytonutrients that, when included in feed supplements, allow sustained honey bee brood rearing has immense potential to improve outcomes for colony survival, and in turn the beekeeping businesses we rely on for our food production."
I expect there are dozens of different things that influence how well a hive does, some good, some bad. Maybe having better nutrition overpowers the effect of pesticides, varroa mites, etc.

I doubt such distilled diet would suffice/be benificial in the long run but maybe see it as rations whilst banning pesticide and create more diverse flora ecosystems. That might bee life-saving for mans best insect friend.

What if we just stopped stealing their honey?

It's not the honey that produces the nutrient.
The nutrient comes from a plant and climate change is probably altering plant biology to make this nutrient harder to come by. Not to mention the supplemental feed given to bees late fall through early spring (a period where honey harvests have ceased) probably lacked that nutrient.
So, not harvesting honey wouldn't be the answer. Honey bees have been apart of the agricultural process for thousands of years (honey was harvested as far back as ancient Egypt and was used in the mummification process). So, if we stopped honey harvesting, it would be detrimental to both bees and the agricultural system.
Debatable if it is considered stealing as beekeepers usually care of the bees, monitor possible diseases, and keep them from harm by providing suitable shelter.
How about we change the harvesting methods to be more bee-friendly.
- In a standard bee hive setup you don't even extract honey from for over a year. You have to ensure a population that is high and only take when there would be abundance. It would be counter productive to extract too much honey because it makes their population not grow as fast, and therefore end in lower honey production. I doubt bee farmers are trying to get less honey.
- Lol wut. Most honey today means killing all the bees every season and buying a new batch from the breeders the next season.
  They don't "take care" of the bees any more than a butcher "takes care" of their pigs
Do you have any idea how hard it is to milk each and every bee.
- I prefer to milk sugar canes.

Ma called, the bees are back!

Somebody tell Einstein.

Just so you know, the truthfulness of Einstein bee quote is rather dubious, and that's probably why you're getting down voted.
- RELEASE THE EINSTEIN FILES
- I know