Bee venom

Characteristics and opportunities for the beekeeper

Possibly the bee venom, today, is the product generated from the beekeeping activity that is less known, but that has enormous potential that we will detail in this blog post.

The bee venom is known as Apitoxin, and each bee can inject 0.1 milligrams of venom through its sting (the bee will lose the stinger after the sting and the bee will die). It is important to know that the stinger that remains stuck in our skin after itching will continue pumping poison for 1 minute (although the bee has already died for having lost the stinger).

Under normal conditions, for a person to have problems due to direct toxicity, he would need around 500 pecks of bees. However, cases of anaphylactic shock can occur in people who are hypersensitive due to a single sting. Therefore, before going to visit hives, or consider the activity of beekeeping (both professional and hobby) it is convenient to know whether or not we are allergic to bee stings and to what degree.

Bees use this poison to defend the hive against invaders and potential aggressors, and they can also use it to fight between bees if necessary.

Thanks to its properties, bee venom is used in some practices such as apitherapy. From here we want to emphasize that anyone who wants to do apitherapy first consult with their GP or with the healthcare professional assigned to give their professional health opinion about it.

The applications of bee venom in apitherapy are aimed at complementary treatments to relieve symptoms of rheumatism, joint conditions, etc.

Another use of bee venom is that which is applied in pharmaceutical, cosmetic and beauty products. The beauty and cosmetics industry is an industry that moves millions of euros, and more and more often we can find cosmetic products whose star ingredients are bee venom. This can be an opportunity for the beekeeper, who can consider collecting bee venom in his apiary to economically complement his beekeeping activity focused on the collection of honey, pollen, propolis, wax, queens, sale of swarm cores, etc.

It is therefore an idea with great economic potential for the beekeeper the possibility of collecting bee venom for the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and beauty industry.

Mundoabejas.com team