While the world drowns in plastic, researchers are on the hunt for practical materials that are lightweight, tough, and biodegradable. In recent years, scientists have increasingly turned to the natural world for inspiration – with a whole lot of research focusing on the impressive features of spider silk.
But there's another promising alternative hiding in plain sight: bee silk. If you're scratching your head right now, you're not alone. Most people have never heard of bee silk.
"Silk production is far more widespread in nature than most people realize," Oran Wasserman, a molecular biologist who completed his doctorate at Utah State University in Justin Jones' Spider Silk Lab, told ScienceAlert. "Silk has evolved independently many times, with at least 23 separate origins in insects alone," Wasserman explained, including ants, bees, and wasps.to create a film of a specific type of bee silk – an important first step in harnessing the power of the incredible material.
In the insect world, silk can be used for anything and everything from web-building to nest construction to cocoon-spinning.
"Social bees, such as honey bees and bumble bees, produce silk to line the brood cells of their colonies," said Wasserman. "Solitary bees, which make up about 75 percent of all bee species, spin silk to construct cocoons that provide protection from environmental stressors.
""Silk production is far more widespread in nature than most people realize," – molecular biologist Oran Wasserman, but Wasserman and the Jones lab have taken things a step further by creating a non-invasive approach to synthesizing the silk. ), a solitary bee and important orchard pollinator with small, brownish, elongated cocoons that have a distinctive nipple-shaped cap at one end. Despite both using silk to make cocoons, silkworms and blue orchard bees produce their silk very differently.
A silkworm spins its cocoon from a single continuous thread. A bee larva takes a more architectural approach, explained Wasserman. It anchors silk to the nest cell wall, pulls the strand across using its head movements, and fastens it at a new spot, repeating the process until fully enclosed. The resulting cocoon has only a few structural layers, but they work together to balance gas exchange, mechanical protection, moisture retention, and parasite resistance..
These are wasps that locate bee cocoons using chemical signals, then attempt to punch through with a needle-like appendage to lay eggs inside the developing bee . Exactly the combination you'd want in next-generation biomedical materials like surgical sutures, tissue-engineering scaffolds, and technical textiles. The challenge with harnessing these properties, however, was recreating the silk outside of the bee larva.
Wasserman's initial attempts involved isolating single silk fibers from completed cocoons, but the process was laborious and resulted in a lot of broken strands. So the team went back to the source.
"The protocol we developed isolates the silk fibers directly from the larva's mouth," Wasserman explains. To do this, they use a 3D-printed rearing system that mimics the bees' natural nest cavity and then they actually raise bee larvae inside. The team monitors each larva daily and steps in at the exact moment it begins spinning – when the first threads are still loose and within reach.
"One of the most promising aspects of the protocol is that the larvae continue to form their cocoons, indicating that the method is minimally invasive," explained Wasserman. With those strands isolated, the team has now been able to produce the silk from scratch, using molecular biology techniques to insert the target genes into an engineered microorganism that pumped them out in the lab. They then purified the resulting proteins and cast them into transparent, freestanding films.
This is the first time a solitary bee silk protein has ever been produced this way and turned into a material. While it's not directly usable for any applications just yet, the technique opens the door for more study of bee silk across different species.
For example, it's known that honeybee silk is stretchier than orchard bee silk, and this same technique could potentially be used to recreate that silk, or even mix it with other materials. That slime is a mix of mucus and fine protein threads, and when those threads are stretched and dried, their mechanical properties Wasserman's lab uses the same molecular workflow for both hagfish proteins and bee silk, and both materials share a similar underlying protein structure.
This means they could potentially be blended together into materials that combine the best properties of each.
"Silk has been used for various purposes for millennia," said Wasserman. "Even so, most of that attention has gone to a handful of species, mainly the silkworm and spiders. "Across insects more broadly, silk is strikingly diverse, spun by many species that vary in its composition and mechanical properties … But surprisingly many aspects, such as their silk and cocoons, remain understudied.
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