Using CRISPR-Cas9, scientists engineered a yeast to produce the nutrient feed. Farmers could have it in two years.
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.
Get outta here with your sensible, practical solutions! ;-)
Seems easier than engineering edible yeast to get them the sterols they need.
But you see they can sell this! Can’t sell “fallow fields”…
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.
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.
Get rid of the large swaths of green fucking grass, which completely useless when one cuts it down. Let the Dandy Lions grow like we do in Europe and plant more native flowers too.
Clover. Clover is great:
- Lush and green
- Holds down soil we
- Soft to walk on
- Needs less water than grass
- Needs less mowing
- Bees love it
I spread a bunch of clover seed around my yard, and where the grass was struggling (I don’t water or fertilize at all) the clover took over, and where the grass was doing ok naturally the clover sort of let the grass have that space mostly. Now the whole yard looks nice, and the clover is just fucking loaded with bees all day. It’s great. My dog just lies in the lush clover and watches the bees buzz around.
Question from a yank: Is it ‘dandy lion’ or ‘dents-de-leon’?
He wrote it wrong. Its dandelion, and its pronounced in English just like you do, but dependent on the country, we have different words for it. In danish its “mælkebøtte”. Which means “milk bucket”. I think because of the white liquid they have inside. Its good for mosquito bites.
The whole plant is edible too but gets more bitter the older it gets. Especially delicious as a spring salad mix in.
I love eating dandelion heads when they first show up in the spring. Everybody thinks I’m nuts when I reach into someone’s yard and pop it right off the stem and eat it, but I genuinely like them.
Humans: oh sure, let’s not change our insane agricultural system that is the major killer of biodiversity but instead create yet another technonfix by now in 2026™ fiddeling with the genes of another species.
When will we finally learn: there are no technological solutions to ‘manage’ the living. The living is not ‘manageable’./We’ve tried this approach pretty much since 100 years and every one ‘solution’ created two new problems. Look where we are guys, our planet is FUCKED. 50 years ago it was DDT, now it’s Crispr-CAS9…
1000 likes for this celebration of technical human dominance, we’re doing quite right, do we? Not our ‘dysfunctional’ ecosystem is the problem, but our approach to it that is based on control and (technoligical) dominance, instead of humility and respect.
If we had sustainable practices, at least of 3rd of the people in the United States and Western Europe would have a standard of living similar to the people in 3rd world country. This is assuming we don’t compensate for things by exploiting more vulnerable populations.
I personally think this is a decent trade-off, but the people my country would end up exploiting would probably disagree.
I guess healthier hives would be less prone to winter die-off. Wonder what they feed the yeast on?
That’s the tradeoff, it’s bees /s
Soylent bee.
Under rated comment.
It’s been 37 mins and it’s only like 8am
In his defense, it is a pretty good comment (there’s multiple layers going on) while being a bit of a sleeper at the same time. And given the size of the Lemmy audience, it’s not likely to ever get the number of votes it deserves.
And in your defense, I doubt he really thought it through that deeply, and instead just posted the first idiotic thought that came to mind.
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
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.
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?
explain how one would we or us stop it with the greed
wealth caps
world wide…
Yeah, it will be hard for the rich to accept that, but its better and easier than switching to a completely different system like communism.
Just continue with everything the same, with a whole bunch of tax brackets, but after 10 million dollar networth is reached, 100% of your income goes to taxes until you’re below the threshold again.
This is a fairly simple rule to implement with huge consequences. Nobody can become a billionaire anymore. Nobody can hoard wealth, wealth will spread to the poor now as well, feeding a middle class that was starved, to become the biggest group
Governments now get a huge income stream that they can use for free education, free housing, free healthcare, universal basic income.
Since nobody can become insanely rich anymore, you will have less people push for the get rich quick schemes. Companies will cheat way less because why? It won’t get you any extra income if you hit the limit already, so why would you? Nobody is insanely rich, so nobody is insanely powerful either, so no more trumps, no more musks. Greed will actually stop if you put a hard limit on how much you can be worth.
Prices of goods would go down to normal again. Can’t own a 100M dollar home if your max worth is 10M. A family of 2 could potentially own a 20M home, but they would have no money left for anything else, like food. Art will once again be priced normally and most art can return to the museums for everyone to enjoy.
Big-ass billion dollar company? Well, that requires at least 100 share holders, but they would not be able to own anything besides that company because again, hard caps. Company shares rise? Great! Now some of your shares will go to the government because hard caps. You don’t want to lose money just because the shares go down, so you will likely share your shares over multiple companies. So you’ll end up with more smaller companies with many many more owners and shareholders. No more single venture capital company that can buy up companies to then shred them out.
I could go on for a while, but you get the picture.
I would say that 10M is much, still, I would even go for a cap on 5M.
“Scientists synthesize nutrients Bees no longer get because humans destroyed all the flowers, and we think this is a net good.”
Yeah. That’s unfortunate. An absolute travesty. But we’ve found a way to fix what we have fucked up. And that’s good. Don’t minimalize it.
We’ve broken the system. That sucks. But we’ve found a way to fix it for now. Not as good, but we are trying to do something.
Give some credit to the folks that are trying to fix our fuck ups. God damn it some people have realized what a mess we’ve made and are trying to do something to fix it. Small wins may just save our asses if we let them stack up enough.
No no, you see other people did bad things, so the scientists’ attempts to make the world a better place are bad. That’s just how ethical philosophy works, I don’t make the rules
