Is sweet honey just food for the industrious little bees?In fact, chemicals in plant nectar have medicinal properties that help bees stay healthy.From detoxifying pesticides to prolonging life, honey’s benefits go far beyond rewarding hard-working bees in their hives.
No one knows honey better than bees.They are not only producers of honey, but also sophisticated consumers: give a sick bee different kinds of honey, for example, and it will choose the one that is most resistant to infection.
The nuances of nutrition in different honeys are not yet fully understood.Decades ago, says Entomologist Mae Berenbaum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, most “functional foods” — those that provide health benefits beyond basic nutrients — made no mention of this.”Beekeepers and scientists who study bees think honey is nothing more than sugar water.”
A number of studies have shown that honey is full of phytochemicals that affect the health of bees, helping them live longer, improving their tolerance to harsh conditions such as cold, and improving their ability to fight infections and heal wounds.As bees struggle in recent years with parasites, pesticides and habitat loss, the findings shed light on one of nature’s magic tricks: honey.
Of honey, Berenbaum says, “It’s a wonderful substance, but I don’t think people realize its full value yet.”
1.Secrets of the Hive
Whether spread on toast or added to tea, honey is delicious in many different ways, but it’s not just a sweetener.True, this gooey liquid is mostly made of sugar, but it also contains a variety of enzymes, vitamins, minerals and organic molecules that make each honey unique and offer a range of health benefits to bees.
Many bees produce honey: bumblebees, antbees and even wasps, but only real bees produce enough honey to fill supermarket shelves.This ability to produce honey didn’t happen in a day, it evolved over millions of years.
About 120 million years ago, flowering plants began a wave of evolution and dispersal.In this wave, bees split off from wasps.The diversity of flower plants and a shift in bee feeding behaviour (feeding pollen to larvae instead of insects) contributed to the evolution of about 20,000 species of bees that are now known.
For bees, becoming a professional nectar maker requires more behavioral and chemical skill: they add a little nectar to the pollen to form a more transportable bundle, and they develop wax secreting glands that store liquid nectar and solid pollen separately.
“Beeswax is a flexible, pliable building material,” says Christina Grozinger, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University who studies the underlying mechanisms of honeybee social behavior and health.To build a hive, bees shape beeswax into hexagons, which prove to be the most efficient shape for storing things because hexagons can be packed tightly together.”It’s an engineering marvel,” Grozinger said.
Building many of these small, uniform cells has another advantage: their larger surface area means that water evaporates more quickly, and less water means less microbial growth.
Honey production begins when foraging bees start sucking nectar from flowers.While it looks like the bee is “eating” nectar, it doesn’t go into the stomach, at least in the traditional sense. It stores it in a pouch, where it mixes with enzymes.
The first to do its job is an invertase that “snips” the sucrose molecule in nectar in half, producing the simple sugars glucose and fructose. (Oddly, research suggests that bees do not have the gene for this invertase, which is probably produced by a microbe that lives in their gut.)Back at the hive, the bees spit out the honey and pass it on to the first bee on the “assembly line.”Subsequent mouth-to-mouth transfers reduce the water content and add more enzymes, which continue to break down the nectar and stop microbial growth.
Next, the bees place this mixture of nectar and enzymes into the hive and then flap their wings to evaporate more water.Then another enzyme (glucose oxidase) kicks in: converting some of the glucose into gluconic acid, which helps honey preserve.This chemical reaction lowers the pH of the nectar (increasing acidity and producing hydrogen peroxide, which stops microbial growth but is toxic in high concentrations).In addition, pollen and yeast may bring in more enzymes to break down some of the peroxide and keep it under control.
The final step is to cover the hexagonal chambers with beeswax.The nurse bees feed the processed honey to the rest of the hive and store the rest for cold or rainy days.
2.It’s sugar. It’s medicine
Berenbaum first became interested in honey in the mid-1990s because of its magical nectar.That’s when she learned that plant nectar is full of chemicals called phytochemicals, compounds that block pests and help plants grow and metabolize.She had a hunch that these phytochemicals would follow when bees turned nectar into honey.If that were true, she wondered what phytochemicals might do to bees.
So Berenbaum set out to explore the diversity of chemicals in honey.In 1998, her research team found that different honeys contained different levels of antioxidants, depending on the flower source of the honey.”It piqued my interest,” she said.The team later found that bees fed sugar water with a mixture of two honey phytochemicals (coumaric acid and the powerful antioxidant quercetin) were more resistant to pesticides than bees fed sugar water alone.In addition, she and her collaborators reported in the journal Insects in 2017 that bees fed water containing phytochemicals lived longer than bees in the control group [1].
Not only that, but other studies have found other phytochemicals in honey.Studies have shown that abscisic acid can enhance the immune response of bees, speed up wound healing time and improve their tolerance to cold temperatures.Other phytochemicals can blunt the effects of parasites, one of the main causes of bee decline: for example, feeding fungus-infected bees a syrup containing thymol, a phytohormone derived from the thyme plant, reduced the number of fungal spores in their bodies by more than half.Phytochemicals have even been shown to inhibit a bacterium that causes smut-disease, a common disease of bee larvae, in Europe and the United States. This bacterium is so destructive and infectious that once it has spread through a colony, people often burn the entire hive to prevent it from spreading further.
Some phytochemicals seem to work by enhancing the activity of genes associated with detoxification and immunity [2].In 2017, a research team reported in the Journal of Economic Entomology that when bees were fed nectar containing phytochemicals like neonicotinoids, production of a gene responsible for making antibacterial proteins was accelerated.
Phytochemicals may also make bees healthier by keeping their microbial communities thriving in and on them.Last year, researchers reported in the Journal of Applied Microbiology that caffeine, gallic acid, p-coumaric acid, and kaempferol all improved the diversity and number of bees’ gut microbes [3].The healthier the bees’ gut microbes, the lower the intensity of frequent parasitic infections.
What’s more, bees even select honey that is good for their health when they are sick.Entomologist Silvio Ehler, now at the Julius Kuhn Institute in Germany, and his team showed four species of bees infected with the parasite.”We’re just giving them a choice,” Eller said.Writing in the journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology, they say that sick bees prefer mallow nectar [4], which is the best treatment for infections and has ultra-high antibiotic activity.
Research has shown that bees choose the best honey to treat their diseases.Eller and his colleagues infected bees with a parasite that causes sporozoiasis, then used the olfactory machine shown here to let the bees choose different kinds of honey.Experiments showed that the more severe the infection, the more often the bees chose mallow nectar.After six days, the bees had far fewer microsporidia than the other bees.
3.Self-healing with honey
Despite a range of health benefits, including immune-boosting benefits, honey’s survival remains in doubt.From April 2020 to April 2021, U.S. beekeepers lost 45 percent of their colonies [5], the second-worst year since the nonprofit Bee Information Institute began the survey in 2006.While beekeepers usually leave some honey in their hives, it seems important to have a variety of honey: studies have shown that bees that collect different honey from locust tree flowers, sunflowers, or mixed flowers can resist different types of bacteria [5].
Eller likens this variety of honey to a pharmacy.”We go to the pharmacy when we’re sick and say: We need this for our headache, we need that for our stomachache…And various kinds of honey together form a ‘pharmacy’ that can cure bee disease.”
Cover crops, such as this crimson clover plant, are planted in bare soil after the crop has been harvested.Flowering cover crops help support local pollinators, including bees.
Belem baum on entomology yearbook 2021, co-authored a paper with others about the impact of honey to the bee health review [7], she says, only in the case of a suitable flowers bees, honey can be established his own “pharmacy” [8] – this in not only embodies in the quantity and diversity, more is closely related to the whole growing season of plant.Bees fly into fields every year to pollinate crops like apricots, apples, pumpkins and pears, all of which lack the biodiversity of flowers.
Entomologist Alati Seshadri works at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee Health Laboratory in Davis, California.Improving the diversity of flowers does benefit bee health, Seshadri said.Through the Protected Area Program, USDA also encourages landowners to convert portions of their farmland to wildlife reserves.”Agriculture needs to continue, but also allow pollinators to survive better.”Seshadri said.
Feeding bees better nutrition won’t solve all their problems.But Eller thinks it might help to make sure bees get enough medicine.He suggests keeping some of the honey extracted from various flowers in hives so that bees have a good supply of honey throughout the year.
Berenbaum started investigating honey a few years ago because she felt that honey research had not been given enough attention.Knowledge is also essential to success, she said. “I’m glad honey is finally getting some attention.”
