Shana Tova from the Technion
At Rosh Hashanah, honey carries a simple wish: that the year ahead will be a sweet one.
But behind every drop of honey is something remarkable. Bees, flowers and entire ecosystems working together, a delicate balance on which much of our food, and our future, depends.
At the Technion, scientists and students are using ingenuity to explore that relationship, from understanding the biology of bees to imagining entirely new ways of making honey.
🍯 Honey without the bees
Could we make honey while leaving the bees to do what our planet needs them to do?
A Technion student team developed an ingenious approach to producing bee-free honey using engineered bacteria. The team reprogrammed Bacillus subtilis bacteria to help reproduce the biological processes involved in making honey, even opening up the possibility of controlling characteristics such as its flavour.
The project, developed under the guidance of Prof. Roee Amit and colleagues, won a gold medal at the international iGEM synthetic biology competition. The innovation subsequently became the subject of a published patent for bee-less honey.
It’s an idea with a bigger purpose. With bee populations under pressure, innovations like this invite us to imagine a future in which we can produce the foods we love while allowing bees to devote more of their extraordinary work to the natural world.
🐝 Decoding the honey bee
Technion researchers have also turned the tools of computational biology towards the bee itself.
Researchers Noam Kaplan and Michal Linial developed ProtoBee, using computational methods to analyse and organise the honey bee’s predicted proteins. Their work examined more than 10,000 predicted honey bee protein sequences, helping scientists extract biological insights from the bee genome and identify potentially unique bee proteins and functions.
It is a reminder that sometimes understanding one of nature’s smallest creatures requires some of our most sophisticated science.
🌱 Building the future of food
And that spirit continues today. The Technion’s Carasso FoodTech Innovation Center brings food technology and biotechnology together, with advanced R&D infrastructure and facilities for areas including fermentation, bioprocessing, product development and scale-up. Its mission connects scientific discovery with industry and innovation for the benefit of society and the environment.
From decoding the biology of the honey bee to imagining honey made in an entirely new way, these stories share something fundamental: the belief that human ingenuity can work with nature to create a more sustainable future.
This Rosh Hashanah, as we dip apples into honey, we celebrate the curiosity to ask what if?, the courage to pursue new ideas and the people turning those ideas into possibilities.
Shana Tova U’Metuka from the Technion.
Here’s to a year of discovery, possibility and sweeter things to come.