How Is Royal Jelly Made?
What Is Royal Jelly?
While honey is a common household product, only a few people know about its cousin – royal jelly.
Royal jelly is a milk-like substance produced by the worker bees from their glands and is used as a nutritional substance in the queen bee’s diet throughout her life.
What makes this substance a superfood or a miraculous food is its many amazing properties that help combat several diseases and heal the body.
What Is Royal Jelly Made Of?
It’s made up of protein, carbohydrates, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and many smaller compounds.
It’s also regarded as one of the richest sources of free amino acids.
It is anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antibacterial, antimicrobial, and antifungal.
What Are the Benefits of Royal Jelly?
Royal jelly is proven to play an essential role in helping combat the side effects of cancer therapies. It’s known to slow down the growth of certain cancer cells.
But that’s not it. It can also help lower blood sugar levels in diabetes patients, regulate blood pressure and relax blood vessels in hypertension patients, reduce cholesterol levels, help ease postmenopausal symptoms, and improve fertility.
There are ongoing studies on what more diseases royal jelly can help us with.
Regardless, it’s considered one of the best dietary supplements that can produce a positive impact with regular intake.
How Is Royal Jelly Made?
Let’s understand the difference between queen bee and worker bee before we find out how royal jelly is made.
| Queen Bee | Worker Bee |
| Developed reproductive functions | Sterile female bees |
| Can live for several years | Lives between few weeks to few months |
| Rich diet of royal jelly throughout life | Diet of honey, pollen, worker jelly |
| Larger in size with well-developed reproductive organs | Small in size suited to their tasks |
Since nurse bees are the only ones that produce royal jelly, their diet is important too. Nurse bees consume pollen, which helps them develop their hypopharyngeal glands that produce royal jelly.
There’s a special cell called the queen cell. It’s larger and different from the worker cells. When the worker bees need a new queen, they select a young larvae and place it in the queen cell. They fill it with royal jelly, which is the primary food for the queen bee that she is fed throughout her life.
When royal jelly has to be harvested, the beekeepers are cautious in their harvest to not disturb the queen bee or cause any damage.
This delicate process is extremely detailed and difficult.
One must understand that since the royal jelly is produced to feed the queen bee, there needs to be an absence of the queen bee for the worker bees to select a new queen and place royal jelly in the cells, which are then harvested.
This is how the beekeepers harvest the royal jelly: (Convert the below into a graphic chart)
1. The beekeepers choose a colony without a queen and with numerous worker bees that would produce royal jelly. They may even create conditions where the worker bees think they’re without the queen.
2. They prepare a frame that has many queen cups for bees to build the queen cells on and they insert little jelly in it. They add larvae to these cups.
3. They insert this frame into the colony.
4. They wait for the worker bees to make queen cells.
5. Around 72 hours, once they see that the worker bees have filled it with the royal jelly it’s time to remove the frame from the colony.
6. Once they carefully remove this frame, they extract the royal jelly with the help of delicate tools without harming it.
7. They store the jelly in the appropriate conditions to preserve it.
A process as delicate as this requires expertise from the beekeepers. Because of the painstaking process and duration, the royal jelly is an expensive product.
Nevertheless, the qualities it possesses far outweigh its price.
If you wish to know more about how we source our royal jelly, you can contact us at (contact number).
