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by Guest » Wed, 31 Aug 2005 2:26 pm
ROYAL JELLY is secreted from the hypopharyngeal glands located on either side of the head of a bee. Nurse bees, between the ages of five and fifteen days, are the only ones able to secret this substance used to feed larvae and the queen.
Royal jelly is a thick, creamy substance synthesized in the body of the bee during the digestion of bee pollen. Because it is eventually secreted from glands of the bee, royal jelly contains high levels of hormones and proteins. It also contains lipids, minerals, vitamins (A, C, E, and B), twenty amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, sterols, phosphorus, acetylcholine, nucleic acids (RNA/DNA), gelatin, gamma globulin, decanoic acid (an anti-bacterial and anti-fungal component), and other yet unidentified components.
It is the royal jelly that make the queen bee. She is made, not born. The eggs laid are all the same. The only difference is that one is singled out to be a queen and is exclusively fed the royal jelly all of its life. The other larvae only receive the substance for the first three days of their existence.
Careful testing has revealed that royal jelly that is twenty-four hours old is four times more biologically active than royal jelly forty-eight hours old. The kind fed to the queen is never more than twenty-four hours old; and she lives forty times longer than the worker bees. Since it deteriorates so rapidly, the royal jelly must be freeze-dried as quickly as possible after harvesting.
The harvesting may explain why royal jelly is expensive. Collection is very involved. The queen bee is removed from the hive. Since the colony cannot live very long without a queen, the colony frantically tries to rear another. The beekeeper will then cut away the walls of the queen larvae cells and collect the jelly. As this method is not very efficient or acceptable, most beekeepers have adopted another method. Large harvests involve mass production of queens. Young worker larvae, eight to twenty-four hours old, are taken out of their brood cells and transferred to queen cells. These are much bigger and easier for the beekeeper to remove. Each of these cells is primed with a bit of royal jelly. Nurse bees begin feeding the larvae with the royal jelly they secrete. By the end of the third day, each queen cell will contain the maximum amount of royal jelly possible. The frames are then removed and the cells cut down. The larvae are removed and discarded, and the royal jelly extracted. To produce one pound of royal jelly, it requires the lives of 1000 bees.