Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Science (28 page)

However, there are moderate amounts of the B vitamins in royal jelly.

Again, due to the fertility of the queen bee, it was claimed that royal jelly was rich in sex hormones. This claim was made totally without the benefit of taking any actual measurements. Royal jelly has only microscopic levels of any sex hormones. Recently, the male sex hormone, testosterone, has been identified, but only by using extremely sensitive techniques. The amount of testosterone in one gram of royal jelly is about 250,000 to 1,000,000 times less than the average adult human male produces in one day.

Royal jelly is supposed to lower cholesterol levels. But while this has often been claimed, it has never been proven.

It is true that it has some antibiotic properties. However, it covers only a small range of bacteria, and is only about one-quarter as powerful as the original penicillin. Antibiotics have come a long way since then. But in an emergency, royal jelly would be better than nothing.

The Side Effects

Paracelsus (1493-1541) was one of the first scientific doctors and pharmacologists. He recognised that all drugs have side effects, and said something to the effect that ‘all drugs are poisons, what matters is the dose’.

Bee Genders

Bees seem to have three genders.

First, there is the single queen. She is definitely female. She takes 16 days to grow from egg to adult, and will live for some six years.

Second, there are the worker bees, up to 60,000 of them in each beehive. They are female, but usually have no functioning ovaries, so they don’t normally produce eggs. They take 21 days to grow from an egg to an adult. Their life span is some 42 active days. So if they are hatched just before winter, they will be quite inactive during the winter, and can live for several months. But in those several months, they will have only some 42 days in which they are fully active. They come from eggs that the queen bee has fertilised with her stored sperm. Both the queen bee, and all the female worker bees, have genes from both the queen bee’s mother and father.

Third, there are drones, up to a few thousand in number in each beehive. They are male. They take 24 days to grow from an egg to an adult. Their only job is to fertilise the queen bee. They arrive in the spring, and after mating with the queen bee, the survivors are booted out from the hive in the autumn and die. They can live for up to six months. They come from eggs that have not been fertilised with sperm. So they have genes only from the queen bee.

For absolutely no good reason, many of the adherents or devotees of royal jelly claim that because it is ‘natural’, it has no bad effects at all. Funnel web spider venom and fierce snake venom are each 100% natural, but they definitely have bad effects on people.

In the case of royal jelly, people who are asthmatics, or who are allergic to bee stings, are definitely at a high risk of serious side effects. These can range from the mild (skin irritations) to serious (bronchial distress) to deadly (anaphylactic shock).

It causes allergic contact dermatitis in 20% of those into whom it’s injected. (In its early days, royal jelly was often injected, usually into the muscle or into the abdominal peritoneum.)

Royal Jelly—1

The first thing to realise is that royal jelly is not a single substance. It is a mixture.

The nursing bees feed the larvae directly from their mouths. They have two main glands for this. The hypopharyngeal gland produces a clear liquid. This seems to be ‘regular’ food, full of nutrients. The mandibular gland produces a white liquid. This white liquid seems to carry both nutrients and the special chemicals that force the transformation. It seems to somehow force the ovaries to ‘appear’ or grow in the queen bee. These two liquids are not stored. They are disgorged and immediately exuded into the cells into which the eggs have been previously squirted by the queen bee.

In their early days, the larvae float in their individual cells, like balls in a sea of royal jelly. These cells have six sides, and are made from wax exuded from the bodies of the worker bees. The queen bee will pump out 1,500-3,000 fertilised eggs in the beehive each day. These fertilised eggs all have the same DNA, and are
essentially identical. All the bee eggs slosh around in royal jelly. The eggs take about three days to hatch into larvae.

Buzzing with Enthusiasm

A colony of honeybees functions with the elegance and efficiency of a single organism. But while it has just one queen bee, it also has up to 60,000 sexually immature females who are the worker bees, and up to 1,000 males, known as drones.

The vast majority of the larvae start off getting a mixture of about 70% clear liquid (food) and 30% white liquid (food + ‘special chemicals’). After a few days, this drops to 100% clear liquid and 0% white liquid. These larvae (destined to become workers) get just enough food to grow (known as ‘progressive provisioning’).

The Hive

A colony of honeybees functions with the elegance and efficiency of a single organism. But while it has just one queen bee, it also has up to 60,000 sexually immature females who are the worker bees, and up to 1,000 males, known as drones.

The honeybees do
not
collect honey from flowers – they make it. They collect pollen (equivalent to flowers’ sperm) and transfer some of it to other flowers. But they keep most of it, because it contains proteins and fatty acids essential for the growth of young bees. They also collect nectar, a sugar solution in flowers that is some 50-80% water. They turn the nectar into honey, which is about 16-18% water. Over a calendar year, the hard-working bees may collect and bring back to the hive up to 450 kg of nectar, pollen and water.

The usual temperature inside the hive is about 34°C. The bees can use available water to cool down the hive if the external temperature stays below 49°C. They stop flying when the temperature falls below 14°C, and group themselves into a tight cluster to conserve heat. They can survive this way in temperatures as low as -46°C, but only for a few weeks.

However, the larvae destined to become queen bees get a different treatment. First, queen bee eggs are laid in extra-large cells (roughly the size, shape and texture of a peanut shell). Second, they are given more than they could ever possibly eat (known as ‘mass provisioning’). Third, they are fed a 50:50 mixture of the clear and white liquids. This is what is called ‘royal jelly’.

But three or four days after hatching from the eggs, the larvae that are destined to become worker bees have their royal jelly diluted with honey and pollen.

All the eggs have the potential to be a queen—but this metamorphosis happens only to the larvae fed on 100% royal jelly. If the hive becomes too populous, the worker bees select a dozen or so larvae to become potential queen bees. The chosen larvae undergo a complex series of hormonal and biochemical actions and reactions, as part of the process of turning into queen bees. After Day 5, they are ready to pupate, to turn from a larva into a bee.

Royal Jelly—2

The only time royal jelly can be harvested is when too much of it is made. This happens during swarming, or queen replacement. During the subsequent ‘queen rearing’, the larvae destined to be queens are given too much to eat. This usually happens around Days 4 to 5 of the larvae’s life. So all commercial royal jelly is the food originally intended for young queen bee larvae.

Typically, some 500 g of royal jelly can be produced from a well-managed hive during a season of some 5-6 months.

Royal jelly is similar in appearance, consistency and colour to condensed milk or mayonnaise. It has a cheese-like smell, and a characteristic sour flavour. (The unpleasant taste apparently makes it more acceptable as a ‘medicine’.) It’s whitish in colour, with
beige or yellow tinges. It’s about 60-70% water, with various proteins making up about 17-45% of its dry weight. Sugars (mostly sucrose and fructose) make up 18-52% of the dry weight. The rather odd fats account for 3.5-19% of the dry weight. Minerals constitute only 2-3% of the dry weight. They are, in descending order, potassium, calcium, sodium, zinc, copper and manganese.

It’s about 10% more dense than water, and will dissolve slightly in water.

It is fairly viscous, having a consistency similar to warmish honey.

Royal jelly is essential in the diet of all worker bees for the first few days of their lives, and for the entire life of a queen bee.

Rather Odd Fats

The rather odd fats in royal jelly account for 3.5-19% of its dry weight.

There’s something strange about those fats. To quote the United Nations report, ‘The lipid fraction consists to 80-90% (by dry weight) of free fatty acids with unusual and uncommon structures. They are mostly short chain (8 to 10 carbon atoms) hydroxy fatty acids or dicarboxylic acids, in contrast to the fatty acids with 14 to 20 carbon atoms which are commonly found in animal and plant material. These fatty acids are responsible for most of the recorded biological properties of royal jelly. The principal acid is 10-hydroxy- 2-decanoic acid, followed by its saturated equivalent, IO-hydroxydecanoic acid. In addition to the free fatty acids, the lipid fraction contains some neutral lipids, sterols (including cholesterol) and an unsaponifiable fraction of hydrocarbons similar to beeswax extracts.’

Young Queen

Before the potential queen bees emerge from their cells, the existing queen bee will suddenly leave the hive, taking a swarm of some 5,000-25,000 bees with her. After flying for a few minutes, the queen bee lands. She waits, surrounded by most of the swarm, while a few bees continue to fly, looking for a suitable home.

Back in the now depopulated and temporarily queen-less hive, one new queen emerges from her cell before the other potential queens. With a complete lack of either royal or female solidarity, she will try to murder the other queens still in their cells—but often the worker bees will try to stop her. However, if another queen bee emerges at the same time, they will fight until the death.

After a whole week of life as the new queen, it’s time for what will be her one-and-only period of sexual mating. The drones (male honeybees) die in the act of mating. She will usually mate with up to ten drones per flight outside of the beehive, and she could have one flight each day over the next few days. (The giant Asian honeybee,
Apis dosata
, has been counted as having over 100 mates.) She will stop when she has enough sperm to fertilise each of the several thousand eggs that she will lay each day of the remaining three to five years of her long life (worker bees live for just five to six weeks during the active season). She will probably never leave the hive again, unless it becomes too populous, and in that case she flies off with a swarm accompanying her.

The future queen bee continues to be fed only royal jelly. She lives on the glandular secretions of the workers for the rest of her life. She never feeds herself.

She will be very different from the workers. She will be fertile, not sterile like the workers. She develops reproductive organs right from the beginning. But over their short lives, the worker
bees successively activate ‘organs related to [their] work such as pollen baskets, stronger mandibles, brood food glands and wax glands’. The queen bee will lay thousands of eggs each day, while the worker bees will lay an egg only very occasionally (perhaps one in 10,000 workers). The workers will, as the name implies, do all the work in the hive.

The queen bee develops more quickly than the worker bees. She is also much larger—up to three times the size.

God Save the Queen…Bee

Despite her name, the queen bee doesn’t run the hive – she is its reproductive slave, and is the mother of all the bees in the hive.

Royal jelly is an amazing piece of work. Its properties can change regular baby bees (larvae) that are otherwise destined to become worker bees, into queen bees.