As natural products garner attention in the medical field, the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria has confounded the current use of antibiotic therapy, leading to the re-examination of earlier remedies such as honey and royal jelly (RJ). Four varieties of honey and one variety of freshly reaped RJ were used to evaluate the additive antimicrobial action against Pseudomonas aer...

Microbiota of beehive products are very little known. We report here for the first time six metagenomes of royal jelly, pollen, and different types of honey from wild and cultivated lavender, chestnut, and fir honeydew. Four metagenomes of epiphytic and endophytic microbiota of lavender and rose flowers are also reported.

The role for royal jelly (RJ) in promoting caste differentiation of honeybee larvae into queens rather than workers is well characterized. A recent study demonstrated that this poorly understood complex nutrition drives strikingly similar phenotypic effects in Drosophila melanogaster, such as increased body size and reduced developmental time, making possible the use of D. melanogaster as a mod...

Renin is the rate limiting enzyme in the renin-angiotensin (RA) system that regulates blood pressure and electrolyte balance. In this study, we investigated the renin inhibitory effect of a royal jelly (RJ)-derived peptide. A dipeptide YY was isolated from the digested fraction of RJ proteins by proteases and was found to inhibit human renin activity. The inhibition constant (Ki) of YY was esti...

The Italian authorities claim that more than 17 people have died this summer collecting mushrooms from its northern and central mountains. People, it appears, are taking increasing risks in gathering these most prized elements of Italian food. And, of course, mushrooms feature as prized items in the recipes of many other cuisines. But the prominence and respect for the few species of edible fun...

In the honeybee, diploid larvae fed with royal jelly develop into reproductive queens, whereas larvae fed with royal jelly for three days only and subsequently with honey and pollen develop into facultatively sterile workers. A recent study showed that worker larvae fed in a queenless colony develop into another female polyphenic form: rebel workers. These rebel workers are more queenlike and h...

“Look back into the nature and then you will understand everything better.” This quote by Albert Einstein clearly point towards the paradigm shift from costlier antibiotic therapies to the old tradition remedies with minimum side effects like apitherapy. Apitherapy is the medicinal use of products made by honeybees. Therapies involving the honeybee have existed for thousands of years and some m...

search for Dr Morgan David Enoch brings up an intriguing set of results. These range from a BBC article, ‘Spotting the Royal stalkers’, a BMJ case report on ‘Exorcism for schizophrenia’ and Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, to Mersey Regional Health Authority’s implementation of care in the community and books, including I Want a Christian Psychiatrist and Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes: now out of p...

The female sex in honeybees (Apis spp.) comprises a reproductive queen and a sterile worker caste. Nurse bees feed all larvae progressively with a caste-specific food jelly until the prepupal stage. Only those larvae that are exclusively fed a large amount of royal jelly (RJ) develop into queens [1]. RJ is a composite secretion of two specialized head glands: the mandibular glands, which produc...

Soluble royal jelly protein is a candidate factor responsible for mammiferous cell proliferation. Major royal jelly protein 1 (MRJP1), which consists of oligomeric and monomeric forms, is an abundant proliferative protein in royal jelly. We previously reported that MRJP1 oligomer has biochemical heat resistance. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated the effects of several heat treatm...