Bee-Derived Supplements

Honey:   Some people like to add a little honey to their birds' egg food. It can also be used to sweeten bitter medicines when added to your birds' water. If you feel compelled to use a sweetener for your birds, honey is the best of all sweeteners you can select. Mind you, I am NOT advocating adding sweeteners. I discuss it here primarily because I know some people do in fact use it.

When I have used honey in egg food, I've used about a teaspoon into the above basic egg food mix. I personally find honey messy (though I love the flavor), and in general, I don't use it for my birds or for myself (being hypoglycemic).

Composed primarily of fructose (38%), glucose (31%) and other sugars (9%), honey is 82% total carbohydrate.  After carbs, water is the next major ingredient (17%). If you can perform simple arithmetics, you'll see there isn't a whole lot let leftover for anything other than SUGAR and WATER (~1%).

The leftover one percent does contain quite a few ingredients however. Eighteen of the twenty basic amino acids necessary for life are found in honey. Also found are small amounts of B Vitamins, Vitamin C, and the trace minerals calcium, iron, zinc, potassium, phosphorous, magnesium, selenium, chromium and manganese.

Honey

The darker the Honey, the more carotenoids and bioflavenoids it contains.

Top that off with bioflavenoids & carotenoids(antioxidants), and you can see that honey is a complex mixture despite being nearly all sugar. Incidentally, the general rule is that the darker the honey, the more bioflavenoid rich and hence the more anti-oxidant properties that can be found in honey.

The other interesting compounds found in the ~1% of honey that isn't sugar or water is a whole host of digestive enzymes including:

Invertase - converts sucrose to glucose.

Amylase - converts complex carbs to simple sugars.

Glucose Oxidase - converts glucose to other metabolic products.

Catalase - Antioxidant enzyme that detoxifies peroxides.

Acid Phosphorylase - Removes phosphates making them bioavailable.

If you don't know how bees make honey, you may be wondering where all these enzymes come from. Basically honey is bee puke - YUM - give me more! LOL. Bees drink nectar and honeydew (exudate from aphids), return to the hive, regurgitate the nectar repeatedly until it is properly digested (that is where the enzymes come from), fan the regurgitant wth their wings to reduce moisture content which retards yeast growth and finally store the finished honey in their combs. We call these busy bees as worker bees - perhaps 'bulemic bees' is a better name.

Properly mature honey does not ferment nor grow bacteria because the sugar content is so high, nothing can survive due to it's high osmotic effect. Therefore, honey stores indefinitely! When times are lean, the bees will eat their honey in order to survive.

Honey also has antibiotic properties and has actually been used as a wound dressing with excellent results (less infection and faster healing with less scaring).

Bee Pollen Granules

Once opened, Bee Pollen should be refrigerated to ensure maximum quality.

Now if bees can essentially live on this stuff, you have to wonder what exactly is IN bee pollen? Well it contains protein in the form of all the amino acids necessary to sustain life (22 amino acids), vitamins (most B vitamins, C, E & A), minerals (Calcium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Iron, Copper, Iodine, Zinc, Sulfur, Sodium, Chlorine, Magnesium, Manganese, Molybdenum, Selenium, Boron, Silica, and Titanium), fatty acids and oils, carbohydrates, carotenoids, bioflavenoids, CQ10 (antioxidant) and lecithin.

Bee Pollen should be stored cold. I add between a half to a full tsp of bee pollen into my basic egg food recipe. The food processor doesn't really break the pollen granules up very well, so I usually grind them in a mortar & pestle before adding the pollen to the processor. It only takes a moment and makes a fine waxy yellow powder which will mix in nicely with egg food.

NOTE: I was having a health problem with gouldians and took them to a vet. They did a fecal analysis and were perplexed by what they found in her droppings. When I finally looked in the scope, I just chuckled to myself. Having several degrees in plant biology, I recognized the pollen the moment I saw it. The vets, being animal biologist, had no clue what they were looking at and thought they had some strange new kind of pathogen. If you have an ill bird and are feeding it bee pollen, be sure to tell your vet this if they do a fecal smear on the droppings. The illness turned out to have nothing to do with bee pollen (she had chlamydia) - but it's still good to let your vet know if you are using bee pollen.

Bee Propolis: Bees collect plant waxes from tree buds and other plant parts and mix these plant waxes with bees wax. The wax mixture is then used as a cement of sorts to repair small cracks in their hives. Like bee pollen, the composition of propolis will vary from hive to hive, depending upon where they collected the waxes and the time of year.

A simplified breakdown of Propolis: resins (50%), waxes (30%), oils (10%) and pollen (5%). It also contains flavenoids (which may be the real reason for any beneficial properties of propolis) and other turpenes. Bee propolis is sticky at room temperature and solid & brittle when chilled.

Health claims: antibiotic, antifungal, anti-inflammatory, possibly anti-cancer and treating sore throats (old time home remedy). Propolis is effective against staph infections. Bees themselves are very susceptible to infection so it makes sense that over the eons, they would have discovered natural products with antibiotic properties. It may also have anti-viral properties.

I do not use Propolis for my birds, so I cannot comment on how much to use.

Royal Jelly: A thick white milky cream secreted from the cephalic glands of nurse bees, Royal Jelly is fed to the future queen bee, and is responsible for her transformation from a sexless bee to the queen. She grows to be considerably larger than the other bees and will enjoy a remarkably longer life. A queen may live up to 5-7 years while a worker will only live about 7-8 weeks!

So what is in Royal Jelly? It contains protein (13%) , sugars (11%), lipids (fats and oils) (5%), nucleic acids, hormones, B Vitamins, minerals, phytosterols and Lecithin among other things. The PDR (Physicians Desk Reference) says that Royal Jelly might have hypolipidemic, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and antiproliferative activities.

Royal Jelly does seem to have an effect on lowering serum (14%) and liver lipids (10%). Applied topically, it seems to have antibacterial and anti-inflammatory effects and seems to promote wound healing. Some evidence points to an anti-cancer effect in mice (but it's not hard to cure cancer in mice so I always take these claims with a HUGE grain of salt). The number one proven health benefit of Royal Jelly is its antibiotic effect. It contains royalisin, a gram positive antibacterial agent.

Royal Jelly comes in either a solid or liquid form (mixed in with honey). It should be stored in the refrigerator or freezer. It is quite costly, and I've never used it for my birds. Vegans and animal rights advocates typically won't use this product because it's considered to be an animal product though bees are NOT killed to collect it anymore than they are for any of the other bee products.

Did you know? Common Honeybees in the US are NOT native. They were brought with colonist from Europe. Did you also know that all bee populations in the US, including nonatives like the honeybee as well as native bees, are on the DECLINE. Spraying crops and bee disease is killing our bees. This affects crop yield because there are not enough pollinators.