• RESEARCH BRIEFINGS

Nutritionally complete food for honeybees (Apis mellifera) has been generated by engineering yeast to produce rare but essential sterol molecules found in pollen. Honeybee colonies fed with the yeast-supplemented diet produced offspring for longer periods than did those fed sterol-deficient diets. This approach makes it possible to rear honeybees without pollen.

This is a summary of: Moore, E. et al. Engineered yeast provides rare but essential pollen sterols for honeybees. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09431-y (2025).

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02600-z

Figure 1 is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

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