- Give Bees A Chance: Ailing Honeybee Populations May Soon Get A Booster Of Healing Fungi Archived Message
Posted by Gerard
on January 15, 2020, 4:45 pm
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"The honeybee can really use a little leg up. Since 2006 and the first discovery of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in North America, honeybee losses have continued to reach alarming rates, suffering on average 30% annual hive losses across the U.S. That steady loss has raised concerns about global food security and the potential deficits of crop pollination for future years. The threat is acute, as without honeybees doing the essential and tedious work of pollinating trees and vegetables, crops worldwide are at risk of woeful underproduction — or worse, collapse of ecosystems. Because one single bee can pollinate 1,000 flowers a day, honeybees play a vital role in the planet’s health and equilibrium. In China, the threat is so urgent that farmers have resorted to using paintbrushes to hand pollinate apple and cherry trees, filling in the gaps for ailing bees. “If our ecosystems fail, what do people do for food?” asks author and mycologist Paul Stamets in the documentary Moving Art. Stamets, an advocate and specialist of mushrooms — who’s employed his pioneering fungi inventions to treat everything from contaminated environments to termite infestation — thinks he has a plan to help the winged whizzes. Teaming up with Dr. Steve Sheppard, from the Department of Entomology at Washington State University, and the Washington State Beekeepers Association, he’s helped form a research initiative called BeeFriendly that looks to reverse the devastating declines in global bee populations. After experiments a few years back feeding honeybees different extracts of mushroom mycelium, made from the filament-like tissue that grows beneath the soil of a fruiting mushroom, researchers discovered the brew provided essential nutrition that offered immune benefits to bees. Multiple factors are typically at play driving honeybee colony losses, including mono-culture approaches to farming, changing land use patterns and decreased forage availability, impacts of pesticides, and an insidious virus transmission by a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor. In Iowa and Louisiana this year, the winter colony counts for honeybee populations experienced just over 60% losses. Stamets ponders, ‘Just imagine losing that percentage of cattle per year.’ Now the mycologist is in development creating a new device, called the BeeMushroomed Feeder, a compact delivery system for mushroom mycelium extract. The feeder — co-designed by Paul Taylor, who works at the company Stamets founded called Fungi Perfecti — is the size and shape of a hummingbird feeder and makes the nutritive fungi extract easily available to bees. Last week, Stamets told Joe Rogan on the Powerful JRE podcast that the feeder, besides containing nutrient-rich fungi, will be solar-powered and Wi-Fi-enabled to collect data on the number of bees that visit, creating mega-datasets for scientists to track honeybee populations. His vision includes having feeders all across the globe. He told Rogan he also plans to give away the first 10,000 BeeMushroomed Feeders to “citizen scientists,” and will make the design code open source so it’s available for schools to 3D print and create teachable moments for students. With a goal to launch sometime in 2020, Stamets said he’s aligned with a major tech company and currently in the development phase working to address the regulatory context for this innovative mycotechnology. His invention is a simple solution that could have massive implications for global bee health — and in turn human health. “I’m really optimistic,” said Stamets, “because we have solutions in nature that we can now amplify and deploy.”" https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcarpenter/2019/11/22/give-bees-a-chance-ailing-honeybee-populations-may-soon-get-a-booster-of-healing-fungi/#723517d12dd8 He can keep his WiFi though.. |
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