What is bee bread?
Bee bread is a nutritional substance created by honeybees from nectar, pollen, and their enzymes. This combination, along with natural fermentation, breaks down the outer shell of pollen and increases vitamin and mineral content, allowing the honeybee to digest the content. It's interesting to note that honey bees have a similar basic nutritional requirement to humans. Their diet requires proteins, carbohydrates, minerals, fats/lipids, amino acids, and vitamins. Nectar, which is converted to honey, provides carbohydrates and various minerals such as calcium, copper, potassium, magnesium, and sodium.
The BEEpothecary® Process
At BEEpothecary®, we do not remove bee bread from the hive. The colony needs the bee bread to feed the new brood in the spring once the winter ends, and to feed the colony throughout the seasons. Perhaps most critically, it needs the bee bread for pollen-scarce times which arise throughout the year. If we take it from them, we jeopardize the lives of our bees and the colony.
We combine our raw honey and crushed pollen, outside of the hive, and allow the combination to ferment for six weeks before bottling it. Bee bread is more easily digestible and more readily assimilated by the human body due to the fermentation and partial digestion process it goes through. This process eliminates cellulose, lowers the starch content, increases the absorption of proteins by breaking them down into amino acids, and makes the minerals, vitamins, and nutrients more bioavailable.
Bee bread and honey are absorbed into your whole body, organs, and bloodstream to help with sleep and provide the vitamins, minerals, and protein that your body needs.
Benefits of Bee Bread
Bee bread extracts have been shown to have antioxidant, antifungal, antibacterial, and antitumoral activities. In vivo studies have demonstrated the efficiency of bee bread in relieving several pathological cases, such as hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, inflammation, and oxidative stress.
See this article published in the National Library of Medicine for further information.
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