Honey bees support billions of dollars in U.S. and Canadian agriculture through their pollination services. Today, though, the many challenges impacting honey bee health has put agriculture, healthy lifestyles, and worldwide food security at risk. These challenges include a variety of factors, including a lack of bee-friendly forage and nutrition resulting in malnutrition.

Monsanto, as part of its global bee health program, funded the Honey Bee Health Coalition’s 2017 Bee Nutrition Challenge. The challenge hopes to promote innovative ideas that address the nutrition and forage challenges bees face today.

“This is an incredibly important endeavor,” said Jerry Hayes, Monsanto’s Bee Health Lead. “We don’t know how to feed honey bees nutritionally-complete diets. It’s a unique realm of agriculture and it’s not easy. That’s why we wanted to fund this challenge, to bring creative and entrepreneurial ideas to the table in the collaborative environment of the Honey Bee Health Coalition.”

The Honey Bee Health Coalition’s mission is to collaboratively implement solutions that will help to achieve a healthy population of honey bees while also supporting healthy populations of native and managed pollinators in the context of productive agriculture systems and thriving ecosystems. Made up of beekeepers, growers, researchers, government agencies, agribusinesses like Monsanto, conservation groups, manufacturers, and consumer brands, the coalition is working to improve bee health by addressing forage and nutrition, hive pests and disease, and exposure to crop pesticides.

On January 12, six finalists presented their 2017 Bee Nutrition Challenge projects at the 2018 American Bee Research Conference where competition judges awarded a total of $40,000 to four of the finalists. The winners also have full access to subject matter experts and others from the Coalition’s member organizations, including mentoring and advice. Jerry Hayes served as emcee at the competition.

The winners are:

• Field testing a seasonal bee diet of amino and fatty acids by Miguel Corona, Steven Cook, and Jay Evans, USDA, Agricultural Research Service, Bee Research Lab received $15,000
• Bee detox from pesticides with the help of micro-particles by Waled Suliman and Brandon Hopkins, Washington State University, received $10,000
• Can mushrooms save the honey bees? by Fungi Perfect LLC, received $7,500
• A look inside the hive with ultrasound by Patrick Heritier-Robbins, Georgia Institute of Technology, received $7,500

More information on the winners’, as well as the other finalists’, projects is listed below.

Learn more about the importance of the honey bee and what Monsanto is doing to improve honey bee health at Monsanto.com.

Meet the Bee Nutrition Challenge Winners and Finalists

**WINNER** Field testing a seasonal bee diet of amino and fatty acids

A team of USDA researchers has developed a schedule of nutritional supplements that give bees access to a wide variety of nutrients in the correct amounts and optimal ratios. Seasonal changes in honey bee nutritional requirements require precisely balanced amino-acid ratios while providing the necessary quantity of both essential and non-essential amino acids. Fatty acids are another critical component, providing an important source of energy reserves, membrane structure, and protection from free radicals. Dr. Manuel Corona’s work with optimal amino acid supplements combined with Dr. Steven Cook’s studies of optimal fatty acid supplementation has shown significant positive outcomes through separate cage studies that measure key honey bee nutritional markers. The team is ready to combine these efforts in a large-scale field test through a variety of seasons.

**WINNER** Bee detox from pesticides with the help of micro-particles

The Quaminus team at Washington State University has been working on a disruptive technology to revolutionize the bee nutrition industry by adding protection value to modern nutritional supplements. Studies show that pesticide exposure is a factor in Colony Collapse Disorder; there is currently no treatment on the market to help bees that ingest toxic molecules from their agriculture neighbors. This team proposes the use of carbon micro-particles (CMPs) that can be easily carried and swallowed by bees, are not systemically absorbed, and pass through the digestive tract and out the body without being broken down. The CMPs carry the pesticide toxins with them, resulting in fewer bees dying due to exposure to and accumulation of pesticides. The material is scalable, easy for beekeepers to apply, non-toxic for both keepers and bees, and requires low quantities per hive, per season.

**WINNER** Can mushrooms save the honey bees?

Renee Davis with Fungi Perfecti LLC proposes the use of fungal extracts for honey bee health. She said, “the approach is simple and scalable,” and involves mixing fungal extracts such as Ganoderma resinaceum, Ganoderma lucidum, and Fomes fomentarious, into sugar water used by commercial beekeepers to supplement foraged flower nectar. The fungal extracts reduce viruses implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), extends bee lifespan, and upregulates critical mechanisms of detoxification. The fungi also parasitize Varroa mites, reducing them as a threat while remaining mostly harmless to adult bees and brood. Davis proposes that the use of fungal extracts is a viable solution for both commercial and backyard beekeepers. Fungi Perfecti LLC has partnered with Washington State University to research the extracts. Learn more by watching this Scientific American video: How a Mushroom Could Solve the Honeybee Crisis.

**WINNER** A look inside the hive with ultrasound

The “Let’s Bee Honest” team at Georgia Tech has been working on a novel way to analyze hive health with ultrasound technology. They have designed a frame with two foundations instead of one, which would allow an ultrasound transducer to scan each side of the frame from within the cavity between. Machine-learning algorithms move the transducer through and between frames, and eventually between hives. Quantitative data allows beekeepers to quickly analyze a single hive’s health, modeling population levels along with nectar and pollen intake and consumption. Keepers will be able to compare the health of different hives, exploring the impact of treatments on hive health. Ultimately, the team hopes to create an affordable hive monitoring system that allows for health tracking across thousands of hives, a task virtually impossible today.

Amino acids provide a nutritional blueprint for bee diets

Anthony Nearman, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, studies amino acids of bees, and proposes creating custom, tailored diets that support the nutritional needs of a colony in any situation. He wants to conduct a combination of bioinformic and chemical analyses to establish a framework for providing the ratio of essential and non-essential amino acids. He will then use the framework to determine the gene expression levels of bees at various life stages, apply them to the model, and ultimately “paint the nutritional life history of honey bees.” He also proposes a chemical analysis of beebread, honey, and bees of various ages to complete the nutritional blueprint, providing the fatty acid and mineral content of natural bee diets and their existing levels in bees at different life stages. The data will allow researchers to understand the nutritional quality of select natural bee diets, and provide standardized methods for building a database of foraging nutrition based on location and season. Beekeepers would then have access to local forage analysis, allowing them to supplement accordingly. His work, if successful, would provide an understanding of the precise nutritional content of various foraging locations while laying the groundwork for the development of custom honey bee diets based on genomic requirements.

Biodiversity mapping shows the way to improved bee diets

Carmen J. DeStefano of Posto Bello Apiaries believes that mapping biodiversity for farmers will lead to better nutritional opportunities for bees. A bee’s dinner plate ranges from about 7,000 acres of land in times of plenty, to 63,000 acres when in nutritional distress. His project aims to uses proprietary software to map biodiversity with satellite vegetation data to provide a visualization tool for farmers, creating a guideline to help them plan for bee-friendly plants. Appropriate planning can help ensure bees don’t have to travel quite so far to find what they need. “The idea is to increase and integrate more biodiversity in production areas, so both farmers and pollinators can be healthy and productive,” DeStefano said. He ultimately hopes that the project will lead to the creation of pollinator coops that enable smallholder farmers to keep bees on their property year-round, and keep those bees happy and healthy where they live.