Honey bee appreciation post.¹ ⁠ #HoneyBeeDay 🐝⁠ ⁠ Did you know: Honey bees are responsible for pollinating nearly a third of our global food crop.🤯 Swipe to learn more, and unlock some of our favorite bee staples that benefit you and your microbes. 🛒⁠ ⁠ •⁠ ¹ Honey bees are indispensable to our ecosystem, and their conservation is critical for maintaining biodiversity and food security. Unfortunately, widespread pesticide use—along with climate change, disease, and habitat loss—has contributed to a reduction of honey bee populations at an alarming rate. The good news: Beneficial bacteria (a.k.a. probiotics) 🦠offer an intriguing new approach to support honey bee health and longevity. ⁠ ⁠ Through our environmental research with SeedLabs, we partnered with Dr. Gregor Reid and Dr. Brendan Daisley to develop probiotics to enhance honey bees’ resilience by supporting their gut microbiota and immunity. In 2018, they developed a combination of three probiotic strains that are shown to impro...