Why Royal Jelly is So Expensive?!

Royal jelly, also known as the superfood of the beehive, is a sticky, white, milky substance that is exclusively designated for queen bees in hives. It is 20 times more expensive than honey and contains more nutrients than honey. While there is no scientific proof that royal jelly causes queens to live 50 times longer than other bees, the health food industry is adamant that it does.

People are now eating it for 125 dollars per pound, but harvesting this elixir can be laborious and can only be done by hand. If done incorrectly, young queen bees can be killed in the process. So, is royal jelly really worth it, and why is it so expensive? People have been harvesting royal jelly for centuries. Bees can gather more nectar and pollen from rapeseed flowers' bright yellow, wide-tipped petals than from other flowers.

The beehive population is at its peak during this period, making it perfect for harvesting vast quantities of high-quality royal jelly. In order to raise his bees, Zorchunk traveled 600 kilometers to Shayang County, Hubei Province. He arrived four months ago, and today he is beginning to gather royal jelly.

What are you doing? There are three different types of bees that are born in the hive: workers, who are sterile female bees; drones, which are male bees; and queens, which are fertile female bees. However, after the queen emerges, only she is permitted to feast on royal jelly.

Beekeepers prefer to remove the queen and store it in a different area of the box away from the hive to maximize the production of royal jelly. Bees will swiftly work to feed all the possible queen larvae; it takes workers 72 hours to fill the larvae cells with jelly. Additionally, Chung makes numerous false cells, which he then populates with new larvae obtained from other beehives abroad.

Zorchung checks on his boxes of hives, removes his cells from the hives, cuts off the beeswax seal on top of each cell, and removes each larva from inside the jelly-filled cell because of the tiny size of the larvae. Too much force can kill larvae, so all future queens need to keep them alive in the cells so they can get as much jelly as possible from the workers. There are 64 cells in each strip, which will fill thousands of queen cells throughout.

When sold outside of Hubei, royal jelly prepared from rapeseed flowers can fetch over $250 per kilogram due to its higher nutritional value than honey, which is primarily composed of sugar. Royal jelly also contains proteins and other minerals. These beliefs are based on what happens to the bees that consume royal jelly. Queen bees grow one and a half times larger than other bees, have a lifespan of seven years, and can lay up to 3000 eggs, while worker bees only live for six months. Because royal jelly is richer in nutrients than honey, it has been linked to a variety of health benefit claims like being an aphrodisiac or a key to long life, but most of these claims have not

All throughout the world, beehives produce royal jelly, but 90 percent of the world's supply originates from China. In the 1980s, Chinese beekeepers began utilizing a high-yielding bee species called apis mellifera lagustica spinola. Zorchung has been employing these bees since he began beekeeping more than 30 years ago, and they are a rare breed of royal jelly-producing honeybees that have helped ramp up production to almost 2000 during the previous 40 years.

Regardless of species, bees are in danger, and forcing bees to produce royal jelly has drawn criticism due to the large number of larvae that are lost or eaten. While lab-grown royal jelly is available, it does not have the same advantages as the natural product and has even been known to kill queen bees that fed on it. The changing climate and the use of pesticides on crops are also causing bee populations in China to decline rapidly.

In some areas of China, the usage of pesticides has become so prevalent that some farmers have started to recruit foreign women to pollinate their crops.