Eating Well (Part Two) – Do we Believe the Headlines?

By Dave Black

“Scientists create pollen-replacing superfood for honey bees, hoping to prevent extinction”

“Saving bees with superfoods: Engineered supplement boosts colony reproduction”

“Scientists make 'superfood' that could save honeybees”

“Scientists create game-changing honeybee 'superfood'”

“Scientists found the missing nutrients bees need — Colonies grew 15-fold”

“Saving bees with superfoods: Engineered supplement boosts colony reproduction”

The news reports have been rather breathless. August headlines have rushed to declare salvation, a publicity machine based not just on the Bogaert et al work reported last April and covered in the last Apiarist’s Advocate, but on a newer paper from a UK group[i] led by Elynor Moore, about earlier work on the same project. The project was funded by the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSR), with a contribution (a yeast strain) from the wealthiest charitable foundation in the world, the Danish Novo Norsdisk Foundation, and the lead scientists are shareholders in Apix Biosciences, who have the patent pending.

Is the research into sterols in honey bees’ diets as good as the headlines are making out?

The Bogaert paper[ii] covered work from 2023 and was submitted for publication at the end of 2024. It started with recognising that a role for isofucosterol in honeybees hadn’t been established by previous research, although it was known to be present in honey bee tissues.

They prepared an artificial diet to their own specification, and added all the sterols that are known to be present, but also prepared two experimental batches which omitted either isofucosterol or another sterol, 24-methylenecholesterol (24MC), to see what would happen. They were expecting that 24MC would be essential, but did not expect that the diet lacking isofucosterol would turn out to be harmful.

They all compared the diets with a couple of standard commercial preparations available to US and EU beekeepers. The best results from field trials came with their sterol-supplemented feed, which led to the claim that they had “developed a nutritionally complete pollen-replacing diet that supports continuous brood production from May to October in colonies without access to pollen” and that isofucosterol was a critical micronutrient.

The latest paper from Moore et al deals with the more practical question of, if we have discovered what bees need (ie., sterols), then what’s a realistic way of supplying them?  The Moore et al trials were conducted in 2022 and 2023, and the paper submitted for publication in June, but it was two years before it was published.

Until now honey bees have relied on natural pollen to provide much of their nutritional needs, but British scientists believe they can now “engineer” a complete diet for the bees.

The starting point was Herbert, Svoboda, Thompson and Shimanuki’s 1980 paper[iii] pointing out that sterols were essential for honey bees, and noting that a 2021 EU Food Safety report about pollen supplements and substitutes in the EU feed market didn’t provide much evidence that anyone had paid much attention to sterols, particularly as pollen was expensive, perishable, and deliberately excluded or substituted so as not to spread disease[iv]. They also realised that “most of the pollen sterols used by bees are not available in quantities that could be fed to bee colonies on a commercial scale”, and went on to carry out a forensic analysis of which and how much sterols were found in the different castes of bee pupae.

Prior work by others suggested a solution to the problem. A yeast, already regarded as ‘food-safe’ biomass in the EU could probably be genetically modified to produce the relevant sterols. Because similar things had been tried, Moore et al thought it could then be done in a commercial process at an ‘industrial scale’ in conventional bioreactors, and the biomass fed to bees, just as brewer’s and torula yeasts are constituents of bee-feeds now. The rest of the paper is a detailed (so detailed...) account of the ‘bioengineering’, diet testing, and scientific validation they undertook to prove it.

Is it a ‘game-changing’ breakthrough? Well, for people putting honey bees to work yes, quite possibly. However, it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem, which is that our cultivation of the earth has in vast areas created an ecology quite unsuitable for most of our pollinating animals to live in, and no one will be feeding or housing them.

References

[i]Moore, E., De Sousa, R.T., Felsinger, S., Arnesen, J.A., Dyekjær, J.D., Farman, D.I., Gonçalves, R.F.S., Stevenson, P.C., Borodina, I., Wright, G.A., 2025. Engineered yeast provides rare but essential pollen sterols for honeybees. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09431-y

[ii]Bogaert, T., Reams, T., Maillet, I., Kulhanek, K., Duyck, M., Eertmans, F., Fauvel, A.M., Hopkins, B., Bogaert, J., 2025. A nutritionally complete pollen-replacing diet protects honeybee colonies during stressful commercial pollination—requirement for isofucosterol. Proc. R. Soc. B. 292, 20243078. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.3078

[iii]Herbert, E.W., Svoboda, J.A., Thompson, M.J., Shimanuki, H., 1980. Sterol utilization in honey bees fed a synthetic diet: Effects on brood rearing. Journal of Insect Physiology 26, 287–289. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1910(80)90135-3

[iv]Haefeker, W., 2021. Pollen supplements and substitutes in the EU feed market: a product/market survey for bees and other animal species. EFS3 18. https://doi.org/10.2903/sp.efsa.2021.EN-6461