Scientists have developed a breakthrough food supplement that could help save honeybees from devastating declines. By engineering yeast to produce six essential sterols found in pollen, researchers provided bees with a nutritionally complete diet that boosted reproduction up to 15-fold. Unlike commercial substitutes that lack key nutrients, this supplement mimics natural pollen’s sterol profile, giving bees the equivalent of a balanced diet.
  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    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.

    I can confirm that - because I live in a temperate region rather close to where those bees started spreading, so we got them rather early. And yet the bees here aren’t specially aggressive or something like that, they will attack you if you mess with their hive but that’s it, odds are that non-hybrid European bees do the same.