Could these bees help reduce plastic waste?

It would be nice if bees saved the world, but in terms of, you know, reducing our plastic pollution. One of the major themes of our research generally is trying to find solutions to the issues associated with plastic waste, pollution, proliferation of microplastics. Polyethylene is about a third of all the plastic that we throw away. The bees, this Genus Colletes, they line their nests with what is essentially a polyethylene mimic. This plastic is biodegradable. These bees, they are solitary, but they form these dense aggregations of nests, which can be tens of thousands of bees. And they can aggregate and nest in an area for decades, but there's no accumulation of that plastic over time because it just breaks down into beeswax harmlessly in soil. We know that bees have a specialized gland in their abdomen that is called the Defors gland. And that's where like, for example, honeybees make waxes and other bees make nest cell linings out of that, usually waxy nest cell linings. What we don't know is how they then catalyze that reaction to turn it into plastic, into a polyester. That would help us understand how to synthesize this plastic ourselves. We are not the first people to think about putting weak links in a polyethylene chain to make it biodegradable. The thing is, there's always a trade-off. The more polyethylene-like the material the less biodegradable it is but it seems like these bees over the course of you know the 80 or so million years of evolution that they've had have figured out this problem for us we are trying to kind of work backwards from their model and figure out what those principles are that allow for this sidestepping of that classic trade-off so that we can take it in a lab, take it to industry, and design a real usable material that kind of combines the best of both worlds and gives us biodegradable polyethylene.