Has anyone had first hand experience with this new supplement?

http://westernfarmpress.com/news/062107-bee-collapse/

(partial exceprt)

DeGrandi-Hoffman and other researchers at the Arizona facility have worked tirelessly with 
Western farmers and beekeepers, who asked for the lab’s assistance in developing a nutritionally 
sound, enhanced bee supplement to foster healthier bees to meet Western agricultural demands.

After four years of research, a new bee supplement called MegaBee is ready for production, with 
plans for market availability by August 2007. Available as a liquid and in a patty form, the new 
supplement is likely to be manufactured at Yuma, Ariz.

“MegaBee was tested last fall and winter (2006-2007) on bee colonies getting ready to go into 
almonds. It was a good time to test because there wasn’t much out there for bees to forage on. 
Essentially they were living off the MegaBee diet. Results look very good,” DeGrandi-Hoffman says.

MegaBee, developed through a joint endeavor with a private company, will join a handful of 
existing bee supplement products on the market.

“To get our ARS science into the hands of U.S. agriculture, we set up a cooperative research and 
develop agreement with an ARS lab partner,” she says, “The research partnership ultimately 
delivers a product to market.

The agreement is a win-win opportunity, she said. ARS invests its expertise into creating an 
enhanced bee diet, while the private company helps create the supplement and conducts research 
on other ARS bee projects.

“The partner supports research monetarily and offers expertise that the ARS doesn’t have,” 
DeGrandi-Hoffman says.

“We’ve worked with Gordon Wardell, who offers expertise in honeybee nutrition and microbiology. 
We have expertise in honeybee crop pollination and chemistry, so we partnered to create this 
diet.”

Wardell, the creative partner, purchased MegaBee licensing rights from the government, 
DeGrandi-Hoffman says. She and the Almond Board of California and Grandi-Hoffman contacted 
Wardell to create the bee supplement.

In his research, Wardell says, “I asked the bees” what they wanted to eat.

“I put dishes of food on a table. The bees came nosing into it – it was a smorgasbord. At the end 
of the day, we’d weigh the dishes to see what the bees liked and didn’t like. Then we looked at the 
nutritional makeup and started combining and mixing until we had a formula for which bees had a 
high preference.”

MegaBee, also called the Tucson Bee Diet, will first be distributed to major honeybee supply 
houses in 50-pound bags. Beekeepers then add their own sugar syrup to the mix. Pound for 
pound, the supplement is more digestible than natural pollen, Wardell says.

“In Bakersfield we found, for a pound of product going in, that we had more square inches of 
brood coming out— even more so than with natural pollen.

Wardell is the president of S.A.F.E. Research & Development, LLC (Sensible Alternatives for the 
Environment).

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