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SCV Outdoor Report: Bee Glue, Part II

By:  Wendy Langhans





Honeybees, doctors and grandmothers are all concerned with germs.  In a hospital you will find a bottle of hand sanitizer just outside the door of every patient’s room.  My grandma kept a well-stocked medicine cabinet.   But honey bees don’t carry a bottle of hand sanitizer nor do they stock their medicine cabinets with first aid supplies.  They do, however, rely on propolis.


Honey bees, grandmothers and doctors all agree - we need to keep surfaces free of germs.  But the methods differ. My grandmother used Lysol and Clorox.  So do hospitals.  But wild honey bees “normally line their hives with propolis, a mixture of plant resins and wax that has anti-fungal and antibacterial properties.”



Honey bees, grandmothers and doctors also agree about this - some home remedies work just fine.  My grandmother taught me to ease my sore throat by gargling with warm salt water.  My doctor has recommended the same thing.  And recent studies suggest that honeybees also use propolis as a home remedy.  Researchers from North Carolina State University found that, “when faced with a fungal threat, bees bring in significantly more propolis – 45 percent more, on average.”  These bees seemed to know the difference between harmful and harmless fungi “since colonies did not bring in increased amounts of propolis when infected with harmless fungal species.”

And there’s a one more area where honey bees, grandmothers and doctors agree - dead bodies need to be disposed.  Doctors often preserve human tissue for medical purposes.  My grandmother preserved beef and chicken by either pickling it, canning it, or drying it.  And honey bees use propolis “to embalm intruders...that are too big to remove.”


For a moment, just imagine an opening scene that could have been plucked from an episode of NCIS Los Angeles - a dead body found inside a beehive.  What will the undertaker bees do?  It the body is small, they will remove it from the hive and discard it about 150-300 feet from the hive.  But what if the body is too big to carry?  The honey bees will resort to plan B (pun intended), leaving the body inside the hive and embalming it in propolis.  The anti-microbial properties of propolis prevent decomposition while protecting the bees from harmful pathogens.  Sounds gross, doesn’t it?

But wait; it gets even worse.  We do one thing that the honey bees don’t do.  My family ate what my grandma preserved.


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