Production
Foraging bees bring pollen back to the hive and pass it off to another worker bee. This bee will pack the pollen into a cell with its head. During the packing, the pollen is mixed with nectar, enzymes, fungi and bacteria, organisms that transform the pollen into bee bread. The resulting material is higher in nutrition than the untreated pollen. Bee bread is the primary source of protein for the hive.
Like royal jelly, honey and propolis, other well-known honey bee products, the exact chemical composition of pollen gathered depends on which plants the worker bees are gathering the pollen from, and can vary from hour to hour, day to day, week to week, colony to colony, even in the same apiary, and no two samples of bee bread will be exactly identical. Accordingly, chemical and nutritional analyses of bee bread apply only to the specific samples being tested, and cannot be extrapolated to samples gathered in other places or other times. Although there is no specific chemical composition, the average composition has been said to be 55% carbohydrates, 35% proteins, 3% minerals and vitamins, 2% fatty acids, and 5% of diverse other components.
A recent study of samples of bee bread showed they may contain 188 kinds of fungi and 29 kinds of bacteria. Bee bread is sometimes referred to as ambrosia.
Bee bread is used in naturopathic medicine traditions and as a nutritional supplement, although exposure may trigger allergic or anaphylactic reactions in sensitive people.
Read more about this topic: Bee Pollen
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)