7 February 2011
Dear Friends,
Checking into a hot Prana yoga class today in Central Square at noon, I was chatting up my in-taker while sharing my breaking news of our Follow The Honey store opening on August 20, 2011 with its website newly published.
I was asked by he if we harvested, or planned to have on our shelves, Royal Jelly. The answer is, we don’t harvest it.
Just as the honey we curate is from other beekeepers; we are doing our very best to source Royal Jelly from an apiary that takes really good care of their bees.
The second musing was more in the realm of wondering – what exactly IS Royal Jelly?
So, I will answer with six reflections from third party sources. Six, being the sides of the honeycomb cell:
1. Royal Jelly is a secretion of the pharyngeal glands (hypopharyngeal glands in heads of worker bees) fed to very young larvae and bees destined to be queen. It is also fed to adult queens on site.
2. Royal Jelly is rich in B vitamins, essential amino acids, unsaturated fats, natural sugars, and minerals such as iron, calcium, silicon, sulfur, and potassium.
3. One pound of royal jelly can be produced by a well-managed hive in five or six months.
4. When worker bees need to make a new queen because the old one is weak or was killed, they choose several small larvae to feed copious amounts of royal jelly in specially constructed queen cells from which they will emerge.
5. This type of feeding triggers the development of queen morphology, including the fully developed ovaries needed to lay eggs.
6. Royal jelly may be cholesterol-lowering, anti-inflammatory, wound-healing, and antibiotic effects and is said to to improve fertility in both men and women.
Just saying.
Yours in the discovery,
Wallis Winzer
Bee Tender
Bees make royal jelly to feed to the queen – that is all she eats. A small amount is also fed to bee larvae.
Harvesting royal jelly for human use requires forcing bees to make an excessive number of queens cells, and most often queens are killed to retrieve the royal jelly. This is a practice akin to milking bears for their bile – an illegal but widely-practiced procedure in China.
Royal jelly is for bees, not humans, and this attitude of ‘bees are there for us to exploit’ must end.
Thank you, Phil. It is so important for those who care for and about bees to heed this point of view and wisdom. The way that you framed forced creation of royal jelly and its industrial harvesting makes it very unappealing, appalling actually. In hoc, Mary