Ampliar

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Ampliar

Ampliar

Ampliar

Cleopatra knew a great deal about the human body, a reason why she turned to natural elements every so often, most of the time to take good care of them. Mayans were experts in healing combat wounds or pus-oozing scratches by relying on their vast vegetable and wildlife environment. In both cases, bees were always the right patterns to follow.

Some centuries later, lots of websites on the Internet continue giving tips on how to use the highly efficient healing methods of yesteryear. Facial aging can be fought off by splashing some mascara on the face made of physiological serum, olive oil and honey. Got a burn while cooking your meal? Smearing an ointment made of aloe leaves and a tad of virgin honey will do the trick.

TASTY NECTAR Honey is born out of the love affair between a bug and a plant. And it's really hard to find someone who dislikes the flavor of this thick liquid that's around 100 and 150 percent sweeter than sugar.

Kids and grownups alike go crazy for any kind of honey-coated jellybean or candy. However, most people don't know much about its composition and are unaware of the sixteen different sugars that make up this amber-looking nectar. The big chunk of the breakdown goes to fructose and dextrose (a.k.a. glucose). Experts label this combination as a super calorific two-pronged blend that elbows its way into the body pretty fast and it's easily assimilated by the organism.

Given its high content of biologically active substances, honey is also the king of nutritional foodstuffs, a gift to the sanity of the elderly and children older than a year old. Conventional wisdom gives honey quasi-magical powers that almost verge on scientific truth. A case in point that comes to prove this assertion is honey's use as an antiseptic based on its incredible ability to kill bacteria. This condition also makes it highly coveted in making skin creams, hair shampoos and conditioners. A shopping binge can reveal the assortment of honey-based care products lining up on store shelves.

But, what's really a bee in the first place? Who's Apis melifera anyway?

I see it trapped in time, stripped of its buzzing and restless zigzagging. A dormant bee caught in a drop of yellowish amber makes a case for its millenary existence since almost a million years ago. Its unruffled look in a book is deceitful because this is one of briskest creatures on the planet. In its home –the beehive- coming and going is nonstop, thus giving rise to a microcosm where ingenuity and laboriousness are the name of the game.

A SOPHISTICATED SOCIAL LIFESTYLE Bees need to have a strict hierarchy in order to carry out their short-lived experience of sucking flowers, making honey and carrying pollen, a process in which workers and drones cluster orderly around one single queen that leads a colony of 30,000 to 70,000 bees. When hatched out of a tiny egg laid in an alveolus, this new member of the hymenopterans' family is only granted 45 days to complete its circle of life. Therefore, organizing its tasks is decisive to guarantee offspring continuation.

The female egg will undergo a metamorphosis from larva to nymph to chrysalis and on to a bug that flies out on its own fifteen days later. Even though a fortnight is good enough for an ordinary bee to grow up, the queen goes through a much slower process that ends in 21 days. For running this creation racetrack successfully, other bees have to feed the egg from the word go using chewed pollen and honey. And, of course, the future monarchs are only fed up with royal jelly. With this thorough care, queens grow stronger and larger, sometimes reaching 18 millimeters long.

But as in any other monarchy, there can only be one queen. The first to ever break free from its see-through envelope will immediately proceed to put rival larvae to death.

Males –hardly ever reach a hundred individuals- are called drones from the day they are hatched. They remain in their buds for 23 days and are fed with the same diet the queens were put on. Drones are chubby, slow-moving, stripped of a sting and live off on workers that are supposed to feed them through their lifetimes. They are born to sign up in a kind of prenuptial list of queen maters, because not all of them are chosen to sire the offspring.

Despite these singularities, all beehive members fulfill their key tasks in playing for the team and juggling a number of roles in the community. Unlike other insects, bees do not pick what chores to do because they are sort of born with a preprogrammed schedule under their wings. They should first act as larvae nannies, then as pollen and nectar collectors, and finally as beehive builders, a job they perform using the wax they produce.

Bees excel as guardians and finally “disguise” as sucking bugs buzzing around the countryside from one flower to the next. Those same little bees, so much hyped in children's storybooks and cartoons, are no other than the 22-to-45-day-old adults. One curious thing about workers is the glands that grow in their well-built abdomens for producing beeswax, the raw material for making their multi-story homes that resemble modern condos. Moreover, this particular resource is highly sought after by man to make candles and cosmetics –lipsticks usually have a clustering portion of wax.

And who could possibly forget about the dancing of their beating wings? Bees fly in all directions when acting as babysitters because in the process of filling alveoli with honey and pollen, they also ought to keep larvae with constant moisture and temperature levels. The buzzing sound of their fanning wings provides good communication and direction for swarms of searching bees. The fleeting fate of drones, on the other hand, guarantees the continuation of the species, and even though humans usually label them as “good-for-nothing couch potatoes,” the mating dance they perform for just a few hours eventually immortalize them. Their desmise allows queen to hatch new eggs that will finally spark off a new larva-nymph-chrysalis-insect cycle all over again.

Drones barred from copulating with the queen are kicked out of the beehive by the workers that grew sick and tired of serving them as waitresses. Bees' supreme goal in this world is to adore their queen. Just six days after its birth, the queen copulates five or six times with a dozen drones. The mating takes place outside the hive, out in the open, in a frenzied effort to hunt as many spermatozoids as she can. Once she's gotten any enough, and as if she were trying to repaint the image of a daddy's good girl, the queen makes a beeline back to the hive and remain locked up there for good. Four or five prolific years are now ahead of her as she'll be laying egg at a record-breaking pace of one per minute.

If the barren workers are her slaves, the queen is equally shackled –in a way- for it has to lay up to 2,000 eggs every day. But watch out! This is not quite right. The queen is also a wise leader that knows how to achieve the enviable cohesion of her society. She gives off pheromones –one identifying every beehive- that serves as a useful tool and map for better work planning.

Following in her footsteps, workers also ooze out their own kind of pheromone with a view to benchmark places, to sound off alarm signals, to control food reserves or regulate the queen's spawning cycle to avoid overpopulation.

POLLEN-CARRYING LEGS “If bees vanished from the face of the earth, mankind would only exist for four more years. Without bees, there's no pollinating, no grass, no animals, no people.” That was Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein in his own words as he expressed his admiration toward these curious little creatures. The toilsome labor that goes on inside the beehive proves this assertion right. Sucking bees play a key role in plants' fertility. Therefore, a circle of dependency is established: there's no fruit without pollen and there's no pollinating without bees.

This is usually a yellowish thin powder produced by flowers' male sexual organs and armed with genetic instructions to fecundate the female sexual organs of plants. Without ever knowing what they're doing, bees carry pollen grains from one place to another. When bees alight on other flowers and leave their burden in them, germination will surely come in a matter of days. Whatever the angle you try to look at this process from, pollen is no doubt a god-sent blessing and bees seem to feel it that same way. That appears to explain why nothing stops them from searching it and flying up to 500 miles to get it.

As time has ticked by, man has learned to appreciate pollen all by himself. A recent research study has confirmed that pollen contains roughly 35 percent of proteins trapped in tiny particles of free amino acids, plus all water-soluble vitamins (biotin and nicotinic acid) and carloads of minerals and basic oils.

Applications of pollen in medicine are plentiful. It helps to provide a natural hormone replacement treatment for menopause-stricken women by pushing harmful cholesterol levels down and beefing up bones. Pollen's basic oil is widely used to counteract the negative effects of marrowbone tumors, arteriosclerosis, arthritis, chronic bronchial asthma, hair loss, stress, Alzheimer's disease, hepatitis, fatty liver, medication poisoning, prostate adenoma, cornea ulcer and even a number of allergies.

Cosmetics makers don't forget about pollen, either. The tiny particle is an ingredient in all capillary strengtheners and in most soap bars.

FROM ROYAL JELLY TO APITHERAPY Seeped by the pharyngeal tracts of babysitting bees, royal jelly is for queens what a mother's breast milk is for a newborn baby. But this is nothing but a sugar produced in the craw of a bee and made up of vitamins B2 and B1, ether essence, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorous and other elements like vitamin E. No wonder the queen is the only suitable bee in the hive to eat it and boast out-of-the-ordinary physical strengths.

Today's drug-making industries manufacture this natural product in tablets by working on homemade beehives in which experts try to copycat the life circle of queens. These queens are bred in plastic nests outfitted with dozens of straining graters dubbed excluders. The fittest larvae –also the ones that eat less royal jelly- are deposited in those graters for as long as 24 hours.

The outcomes are simply marvelous. The reward to this effort is an output of 500 milligrams of royal jelly in every cell. That figure usually ranges between 250 and 400 grams in natural beehives and under normal environmental conditions.

Society's gratefulness toward royal jelly is endless. Anorexia, nutritional and psychiatric disorders, aging, skin ailments, asthma and anemia are counted among the many diseases royal jelly can be used to fight against them, let alone its being a successful coagulant.

Royal jelly is linked to good health due to the composition of its chemical elements. Bees, though, also help us in the never-ending struggle against sicknesses. Since they dwell in each and every corner of the globe, bees have been under the microscope ever since Hippocrates was a well-known physician in ancient Greece.

Using bees for healing processes is not a blunder as some might think, and notwithstanding this kind of therapy started out as an isolated, off-the-wall experiment, now scores of people turn to it despite so much spookiness and panic. Either using a stinging bee or a syringe, the flying critter's poison –it could one of the deadliest under the sun if the person is allergic to it- is now widely utilized for its high concentration of mellitic acid, a substance known for its mighty bactericide and antitoxic reactions.

Swelling pops up once the person is stung and histamine starts kicking in. Bee poison also stimulates the pituitary gland to liberate ACTH that in turn prompts suprarenal sacs to leach cortisone. This clockwork mechanism triggers a self-healing process inside the body. Studies have shown this method is a hundred times more powerful as an anti-inflammatory than hydrocortisone is. Other chemicals found in bee poison are peptide, apanime, hialuronidase, adolapine and dopamine, a strong neurotransmitter highly longed for by those suffering from Parkinson disease or depression.

A LITTLE BIT OF LEGEND Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, could never be aloof from the time of intrigues and power rifts she was forced to live in. That made poisons part of her daily life, deadly substances that she herself learned to make. She got involved in this business by imitating bees. In Egyptian mythology, bees were born out of god Ra's tears that, once they fell on the ground, turned into hive-building bees and honey makers, as well as deadly warriors if ever attacked. Marco Antonio's flirting and self-conceited mistress loved bees for their contribution to the queen's facial treatments with honey and wax-based depilation. For many centuries, bees were observed as divine creatures and protected by royal decree.

On the other side of the world and much later in time, Mayan dwellers of Central American and part of Mexico (chiefly in Yucatan) had, on their long list of higher and lesser gods, the names of Ah Mucen Cab (the Great Honey Guardian) and Balam Cab (the Jaguar-Bee). Taking account of its good sense of direction, the four cardinal points among the people of that major American civilization were marked by images of that amazing creature called bee.