On August 20, 2025, a team of international scientists announced a breakthrough that could transform the fate of honeybee populations—and, by extension, global food security. Researchers from the University of Oxford, in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the University of Greenwich, and the Technical University of Denmark, have engineered a yeast-based “superfood” supplement for bees. Their findings, published in Nature, offer a beacon of hope amid mounting concerns over collapsing bee colonies worldwide.
Honeybees are the unsung heroes of agriculture, pollinating approximately 70% of leading global crops such as apples, almonds, and cherries. Yet, their numbers have been plummeting at an alarming rate. According to BBC News, annual colony losses in the United States have hovered between 40-50% over the past decade, and the trend is expected to worsen. In the UK, beekeepers like Nick Mensikov, chair of the Cardiff, Vale and Valleys Beekeepers Association, reported losing 75% of their colonies last winter. “Although the hives have all been full of food, the bees have just dwindled. Most of the bees survived through January, February, and then they just vanished,” Mensikov told BBC News. The causes are numerous: nutrient deficiencies, habitat loss, climate change, pesticides, mite infestations, and viral diseases.
While many factors contribute to this crisis, scientists have zeroed in on a fundamental, yet often overlooked, culprit: nutrition. Bees rely on pollen and nectar from flowers, which provide a complex cocktail of proteins, fats, and micronutrients essential for their development. Among these, a specific group of lipids—sterols—play a vital role in larval growth and colony health. Unfortunately, modern agriculture and environmental changes have drastically reduced the diversity and availability of pollen, leaving bees malnourished. Commercial pollen substitutes, often made from protein flours, sugars, and plant oils, lack the specific sterols that bees need to thrive.
Enter the Oxford-led team’s innovation. Over 15 years, they identified the six sterols most crucial to bee biology: 24-methylenecholesterol, campesterol, isofucosterol, β-sitosterol, cholesterol, and desmosterol. These compounds are selectively incorporated into larval diets and are indispensable for healthy colony development. But manufacturing these sterols at scale has always been a daunting challenge. “Sterol has always proved very difficult to manufacture,” Professor Geraldine Wright, senior author and insect neurobiology expert at Oxford, explained to BBC News. “It’s a huge breakthrough. When my student was able to engineer the yeast to create the sterols, she sent me a picture of the chromatogram that was a result of the work. I still have it on the wall of my office.”
The researchers turned to Yarrowia lipolytica, a yeast species recognized for its high lipid content and safety in food applications. Using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, they reprogrammed the yeast’s metabolic pathways so it could produce the six essential sterols in abundance. The modified yeast was then cultivated in bioreactors, harvested, and dried into a powder—creating a nutritional supplement that could be easily mixed into bee feed.
To test its effectiveness, the team conducted three-month feeding trials in enclosed glasshouses. Colonies receiving the sterol-enriched yeast supplement reared up to fifteen times more larvae that survived to the viable pupal stage compared to those on conventional, sterol-deficient diets. Notably, these supplemented colonies maintained brood rearing throughout the entire trial, while the control groups stopped producing brood after about 90 days. Chemical analyses confirmed that the sterol profiles in the larvae of treated colonies closely matched those of bees foraging naturally, validating the supplement’s ability to mimic the nutritional complexity of pollen.
Professor Wright emphasized the significance of the discovery: “This technological breakthrough provides all the nutrients bees need to survive, meaning we can continue to feed them even when there’s not enough pollen.” Lead author Dr. Elynor Moore drew a parallel to human nutrition, stating, “For bees, the difference between the sterol-enriched diet and conventional bee feeds would be comparable to the difference for humans between eating balanced, nutritionally complete meals and eating meals missing essential nutrients like essential fatty acids. Using precision fermentation, we are now able to provide bees with a tailor-made feed that is nutritionally complete at the molecular level.”
The implications extend beyond honeybees. As Professor Phil Stevenson from Royal Botanic Gardens Kew noted, “Implementing such supplements at scale in commercial apiaries could indirectly protect wild pollinators by reducing their competition for scarce pollen, thereby contributing positively to ecosystem health.” Optimized diets created using this yeast strain could help stem the decline in wild bee populations, which are also vital pollinators.
The production process is designed for sustainability and scalability. Culturing the engineered yeast in bioreactors requires modest inputs and can be integrated into existing fermentation infrastructure. The yeast biomass not only contains the essential sterols but also offers proteins and lipids that could further enrich bee diets. This opens the door to developing comprehensive feed formulations tailored to a variety of pollinator species—including bumblebees and solitary bees.
Despite the remarkable laboratory results, the researchers stress that larger-scale field trials are essential to assess the long-term effects on colony health, behavior, and pollination efficacy in natural environments. Variables such as disease exposure, pesticide interactions, and fluctuating forage conditions will need careful evaluation. Still, the team is optimistic that farmer-accessible products could be available within two years, potentially revolutionizing how beekeepers support their hives.
For beekeepers like Mensikov, who have watched colonies vanish seemingly overnight, such a development cannot come soon enough. “When the bees have a complete nutrition, they should be healthier and less susceptible to disease,” Professor Wright explained. The supplement could be especially valuable during years when flowering plants stop producing pollen early, leaving bees nutritionally stressed and more vulnerable to winter losses.
As the world grapples with the intertwined crises of biodiversity loss and food insecurity, this yeast-based “superfood” for bees stands out as a rare example of how synthetic biology, ecology, and agriculture can come together to tackle a real-world challenge. With honeybee colony losses threatening the stability of food production systems, the prospect of a scalable, sustainable, and nutritionally complete feed offers genuine hope. If the promise of these early trials is realized in the field, the innovation could soon become a cornerstone of pollinator conservation and agricultural resilience for years to come.
