Pollinators and Probiotics

Honey bees are essential for maintaining our ecosystems and global food security. However, pesticide use, along with disease, habitat loss and climate change have critically threatened honey bee populations.

Seed Health’s environmental division, SeedLabs, is advancing emergent research on microbial innovations that can enhance and restore ecologies impacted by human activity.

They are applying their expertise in the microbiome to protect honey bees against harmful effects, on the familiar premise that micriobial health is essential for supporting life.

Through this work, SeedLabs have developed the BioPatty - a probiotic supplement for bees. The BioPatty is composed of three bacterial strains. These strains showed potential to improve innate immune response, provide resistance to infection and support resilience to toxic pesticides.

The pathogen load of hives administered with BioPatty were significantly lower than the control group, indicating the efficacy of the modality.

Their findings show that microbial therapies may reduce disease burden, and increase resistance to environmental stressors and pathogens in honey bees.

Innovations like the BioPatty instill hope and show that human interventions that collaborate with nature offer optimal support to our strained ecosystems.

Words by nutritionist Raoul Rechnitz, with thanks to Seed for their support with this case-study.