Why We Never Collect Royal Jelly

#royal jelly

Many bee-related products list royal jelly among their ingredients, long with honey, beeswax, and propolis. Royal jelly is touted as a miracle food for humans, as it is rich in nutrients, antioxidants, and has anti-inflammatory properties. It's found in skin products and as supplements, and while the scientifically studied benefits are inconclusive (unlike that for honey), the name itself "royal jelly" intrigues and beckons.

What is royal jelly? It is "bee's milk" produced by worker bees in a hive to feed baby bees. In fact, did you know a queen is genetically identical to a worker, but she is fed more royal jelly and for a longer period of time?

While royal jelly is another product made by the honeybees in a hive, we hesitate to harvest it. Royal jelly farming requires creating a queenless hive, and thus throws the bees into survival panic: they make queen cups around many eggs and fill them with royal jelly, in the hopes of raising another queen and thus saving the colony. Multiple queens are always raised as security against being stuck with a weak queen, and a queenless hive is an unhappy, restless hive, whose members are in a state of agitation and hostility. A royal jelly operation requires a hive to exist in this permanently stressful situation -with unhappy workers and the bad beekeeper boss spoiling the mood.

All baby bees are fed royal jelly, but given the size of the cells, it is only practical to harvest the royal jelly from queen cells, where it is sucked out of the cell with a syringe. The baby bee in that cell, who was destined to be a queen, is killed. Unlike harvesting honey, wax, and propolis, of which beekeepers traditionally only take the excessive production thereof, royal jelly is never made in excess and harvesting requires killing the baby bee. It's a practice not unlike making silk, where the cocoons holding the baby moth are unraveled and harvested, tough luck for the life contained within.

Recently, I was speaking to a customer who marveled when I referred to our honeybees as "someones" and it was rather enlightening: most people don't think of bees as individuals and I suspect would accuse us of anthropomorphism, but each bee has an individual life and job in this life. They are not flying robots but a community working for mutual benefit of its members. Beekeepers don't generally set out to hurt anyone in the hive and being stung is doubly upsetting: we hurt and we know someone died because of our actions. Like people, individual bees can be overaggressive and irrational or gentle and good-natured, they like dry, sunny days with low humidity and stay indoors when it's wet and cold, they live in communities where each bee has a job and all work towards a common goal, and each bee's ultimate life's work is to raise the young, and survive another season. How is this any different from the rest of us?

Honeybees worldwide are in trouble, and it is estimated that less than half of the feral colonies survive a single season. Beekeepers are important to the survival of honeybees, and it has been through the efforts of beekeepers that honeybees are not in danger of extinction as of yet. The beekeepers we know are all conservation-minded and lovers of nature. Like most things in life there is a trade: the beekeepers help the colony survive, and we are rewarded with the surplus honey, and many of the fruits and vegetables we enjoy that would not otherwise exist without the bees' pollination services. In short, we need the bees and the bees need us. But only baby bees need royal jelly and we aren't going to take that away from them.

Disclaimers: Blog posts are opinions, not advice. One thing all beekeepers will agree on, is that if you ask 10 beekeepers what to do, you'll get 13 different answers. Beekeeping is alchemy, nature, and a bit of magic.

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