Superfood for Bees: Engineered Sterol Feed Could Rescue Pollinators — The Science, Risks, and What Farmers Need to Know
Honeybee colonies are strained by overlapping stressors: nutritional gaps from simplified flowering landscapes, parasites and pathogens, pesticide exposures, and increasingly erratic weather. Conventional stopgaps—protein patties and sugar syrup—help little when a critical micronutrient class is missing: sterols. A new approach directly targets that bottleneck. Researchers engineered a production yeast to biosynthesize a suite of bee-relevant sterols and incorporated them into a pollen-replacement diet. In laboratory and early hive trials, colonies on this sterol-complete diet raised markedly more brood to adulthood—even when floral pollen was scarce. The goal isn’t to replace habitat or diverse forage; it’s to provide a precise nutritional bridge through seasonal dearths and extreme-weather years. This article explains the biology, appraises the evidence, details risks and safeguards, offers a field playbook for adoption, and maps the regulatory and market path for bringing sterol-complete feeds to beekeepers and growers.