It may sound counter-intuitive, but crushing up bees into a ‘DNA soup’ could help researchers understand and even reverse their decline, according to scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia.
Research published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution shows that collecting wild bees, extracting their DNA, and directly reading the DNA of the resultant ‘soup’ could finally make large-scale bee monitoring programs feasible.
This would allow conservationists to detect where and when bee species are being lost, and importantly, whether conservation interventions are working.
More information is available here: https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/-/-bee-soup-could-help-understand-declines-and-test-remedies?icn=homepage-banner&ici=060715_beesoup
