Abdullah Asad Iqbal
We all know honey is good for us but what about royal jelly which truly is the food of royalty as it’s what makes a queen bee a queen, but could it have benefits for us? That isn’t the end of the story for bees as they make 14 compounds apart from honey, royal jelly being one of them. Each has a long list of health benefits and more are being discovered.
As this article would be too long if we went through all of them, we will just focus on the three bee products that have the largest clinical backing: royal jelly, bee propolis and bee venom.
Royal jelly is fed to all bees and given to queen bees in copious amounts. It has long been used in alternative medicine called apitherapy which is the use of bee products for health benefits, but scientists have now noticed that its effects could be harnessed for therapeutic use. In clinical trials, it has been shown to improve wound healing, mental health and blood sugar control.
Then you have bee propolis which is bee glue essentially. It’s a mix of beeswax, bee saliva and various compounds bees collect from plants. It’s used to hold the hive together and has long been used for treating infections. ‘Think pro for protect.’ says Dr. Stefan Stangaciu an expert in apitherapy, who regularly uses bee products in his practice and publishes books on the uses of bee products. Finally, you have bee venom, which is the thing behind the sting, but sometimes a bad thing can be good.
Why should you care about bee products? Pharmaceutical trials for diseases are so expensive and the hunt for compounds that can help treat the diseases is always on and bee products can provide options for diseases such as Parkinson’s Disease, mouth infections, mental health disorders and diabetes. Then everyone would be happy.
Mental health is a rising problem with one in four Americans suffering from a mental health problem in a year and current drugs have a high chance of leading to symptoms such as weight gain and vomiting. The cost is usually high and requires trained individuals who are in rare supply.
Scientists and companies are looking everywhere for an answer and royal jelly might provide it. A 2012 study has shown that ingesting three grams of royal jelly per day for six months led to great improvements in mental health, blood glucose and red blood cell levels. This study shows that royal jelly could target cardiovascular disease which causes one in three deaths in America and improve our overall health as a common comment made by GPs these days is, ‘what helps our heart helps our brain.’
‘Natural products are made of a variety of bioactive compounds that have beneficial effects’ says Dr. Kleronomos who regularly uses bee products in his treating, Bee venom being particularly effective for pain.’ Bioactive means the molecules that have an effect on living things such as us humans. The abundance of bioactive compounds found within it for royal jelly is made of a host of compounds from lipids to vitamins. Key among them is a family of proteins called major royal jelly proteins (MRJPs) which have been shown to have anti-inflammatory, anti-viral and memory-improving effects among others.
Bee propolis is a large host of molecules. ‘There are over 70 molecules that have been shown to have beneficial effects in trials.’ That means it could be effective for a range of conditions. ‘Beehives rarely get infected with bacteria and bee propolis is the reason.’ says Dr. Stangaciu. Various studies have shown that bee propolis is effective against infections as it has antiviral, antifungal and antibacterial properties. It does this by disrupting the ability of pathogens to invade a host, produce the enzymes that lead to the problems and so propolis has been shown to be effective in fighting dental infections such as with gingivitis and periodontitis. which is inflammation of the gums. It has also commonly mixed in a cream and Dr Stangaciu showed me a case whereby an individual was treated of his foot fungus after only a month of applying a mixture of propolis and honey. The effects of bee propolis are attributed to its profile of phenolic acids and flavonoids – these are molecules that are in all safe compounds. There are over 8,000 flavonoids so further research is needed to find the exact flavonoid that causes the beneficial effect. Brazilian green propolis extract when given to hospitalised COVID patients leads to a halving in their stay from 12 days in the control group to six to seven days in the treated group. In other trials, bee propolis has been shown to reduce sore throat and swelling and redness of the throat. 83% of the patients of the propolis-arm recorded remission of the symptoms after three days of treatment, whereas the placebo-arm patients had at least one symptom after three days. An unrelated trial also showed that bee propolis is effective in improving memory in elderly Japanese. It led to a doubling in the verbal memory score of the propolis takers and a large increase in scores for other areas of memory.
Lastly, we have bee venom which we all know bees use to protect themselves, but it could also protect us from a host of illnesses. ‘It’s most effective in increasing flow, so cardiovascular flow (the flow of blood), lymphatic flow (the clearance system of the body) and also reduces pain and inflammation.’ Like the other bee products, it consists of many bioactive compounds that target multiple pathways. To find the exact pathway that is beneficial will require much work but we do know that 50% of its weight is made up of melittin which has been shown to be anti-inflammatory.
Bee venom has anti-arthritic effects of bee venom acupuncture (which is where the bee venom is applied on acupuncture points where the bee stings replace the use of needles commonly used for acupuncture), which with those of the anti-arthritis drugs methotrexate and celecoxib. The study used a relatively large sample of 120 people. Over the course of eight weeks, one group received the drug treatment, and the other received five to 15 bee stings every other day. Both groups showed a reduction in their arthritis symptoms, with no significant difference between the groups. Bee venom has also been used for the treatment of knee arthritis as it led to improvement in pain and physical function scores as seen by the WOMAC index which is commonly used to measure these outcomes. Bee venom is also regularly combined with acupuncture in a technique called Bee venom acupuncture which has been shown to be extremely effective in production. Bee venom is also commonly used for pain and treatment usually involves, ‘four to 10 bee stings every day for a few days at the site of pain.’ says Dr. Kleronomos. These are extremely important uses as current medication only deals with the symptoms and has a large list of side effects.
This is the case with all drugs which as they, ‘have a few inclinations and large-side effects, while for bee products it is the other way round, a large list of inclinations and a small amount of side effects.’ says Dr. Stefan Stangaciu, ‘the main side effect is allergy and some bee products are acidic such as bee venom that can cause pain’. Dr. Kleronomos agrees with him stating, ‘the main side effects are allergies and cases of localised pain.’
So, bee products have been shown to have a long list of uses from treating neurodegenerative diseases to foot funguses and I hope I persuaded you that they should be used in a wide variety of cases. But as always use an expert. More work needs to be done to find the exact mechanisms as bee products differ in their contents depending on where they come from in the world as the local environment for that bee will contain different plants with different nutrients.
Furthermore, a way to mass-produce bee products is necessary as many hives do not produce compounds like royal jelly or bee venom in high quantities. For example, each bee only has 0.1mg of venom and the common doses given in experiments range from 2mg – 5mg which would be 20 to 50 stings. If you took that for three to four months which is how long it can take to get the beneficial effects, it could be 6,000 stings. That is one whole hive worth of bees. However, if we could find the exact compounds that cause these positive effects, we could easily produce the exact compounds.
However, that is if the effects are based on one or two compounds. ‘Natural products are made of a variety of compounds that have beneficial effects’ says Dr. Kleronomos which are mixtures of many compounds.’ If 20 or 30 compounds are needed for bee venoms effects on mental health then it would be impractical to try and produce these synthetically. Only more research will tell what the outcome will be. I only mentioned uses for royal, jelly, bee venom and bee propolis that have been tested in human, clinical trials and have shown benefits. Bee products have been shown to be unsuccessful in some cases, I wanted to mention this so you do not get the opinion that bee products can cure everything. Some bee products have been used for over 3,000 years. So, keep your eyes and ears open for more on the benefits of bee products, as there are trials running to look into the benefits of bee propolis, royal jelly and bee venom and who knows what other compounds. I surely will.
