Bee Products

16. Bee Products

Honey, bee pollen, bee propolis, and royal jelly are substances collected or produced by bees for their winter food supply, for reproduction, protection, etc.

Honey is a popular product and is essentially sugar (about 1/3 to 1/2 glucose, 1/3 to 1/2 fructose, and the rest water). Bee pollen consists of certain pollen grains of flowers incidentally collected by bees while gathering nectar. It contains protein, vitamins and minerals, and enzymes. It is not a food that bees consume except as a honey contaminant.

Bee pollen is often used by athletes because it is claimed that it will increase their energy and stamina. This effect, however, is an illusion. Its stimulatory effect will first produce a false sense of increased energy, but like all other stimulants will soon have the opposite effect due to enervation of the stimulation of the organs involved.

Neither is propolis one of the bees’ food products. It consists of various tree resins, collected and applied to the interior of the hive by them. It acts as a kind of cement to keep their hives intact. When ingested by humans, this substance will have a stimulatory effect due to the response of the body to attempt to eliminate this foreign material. It has no place in human nutrition and has no property to “cure” as is often claimed.

Royal jelly is produced from honey and pollen and fed exclusively to the queen bee. It is made by the bees for the unique dietary needs of developing a queen bee and is excellent food for her.

With respect to honey it cannot be emphasized enough that:

1. It is not a natural food of human’s but of bees which created it for their specific needs.
2. Honey is laced with six protective acids. Humans cannot metabolize three of these acids, thus making it a toxic substance.
3. Honey is used as a sweetener. Anything that requires a sweetener to be palatable is not a fit food for consumption in the first place. In the second place, the addition of a sweetener creates an incompatible food combination that vitiates digestion and begets toxic byproducts.
4. Human desecration of the bees’ food supply is unnatural, contrary to the symbiotic role of creatures in nature, and unhealthful both to bees and humans.

With respect to pollen keep in mind that, in gathering nectar, the bee performs a symbiotic service for the plant. It becomes contaminated with pollen and spreads it to the female flower, thus fertilizing it. Pollen’s role is to create a seed package, not to serve as a food. When the seed package is mature, it ripens a part of the package as fruit which is free food for the creatures that incidentally perform a service in distributing the plant’s seeds. That is symbiosis.

Pollen is not unique as a food and has no value. It fails to furnish our foremost need, carbohydrates, for energy. It is only the incipient nutrients and components to fertilize a flower ovary and thus create a seed package of which a part might be edible fruit. In that case we get not only all the nutrients contained in pollen but in a form specifically created to meet our needs. Most important of all we get an easily absorbable complement of simple sugars ready to convert to energy!