What is bee bread?
Bee bread is an extremely nourishing fermented, enzymatically-activated food made by giant rock bees (Apis dorsata) from plant pollen, nectar and bee saliva. Regurgitated nectar and the bees’ salivary secretions inoculate the pollen with a wide range of lactic acid bacteria and yeasts that ferment and transform the bee pollen into bee bread, a treasure trove of bioactive peptides, essential amino acids, carbohydrates, fatty acids, organic acids, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, prebiotics, probiotics and phytochemicals.*
What makes Rosita® wild Bee Bread special?
- Rosita® wild Bee Bread is a unique and rare product. It’s a wild and raw superfood produced by wild honey bees that are not kept in hives and therefore, not exposed to modern beekeeping practices, which can contaminate bee-derived products*. Local honey hunters consider such bee bread to be a health treasure. Finding truly wild bee bread is rare! And it is likely that a great deal of other bee bread products on the market are adulterated and not genuine.* Even some of the domesticated bee breads are produced by humans using honey and pollen and not produced by the bees themselves. That’s why we decided to team up with a wild honey expert and his group of tribal honey hunters to ensure a 100% genuine product. And supporting small, artisan producers is the right thing to do.
- The biochemical richness of bee bread varies upon the flora diversity of the region and the time of the pollen collection. Rosita® Bee Bread is sourced from the world’s most pristine areas, including the Himalayas. The wild bees forage on a variety of Ayurvedic, wild, naturally-growing medicinal flora with health-supporting properties such as neem, sweet neem, jamun and many more!*
- Rosita® bee bread is derived from wild bee hives and wild giant rock bees that cannot be domesticated, and free from human intervention. This means that the wax, honey and bee bread are free of medicinal residue, which are commonly used to maintain domesticated hives and prevent bee diseases.
- Commercially-farmed bees are commonly treated with antibiotics, suffer stress, eat synthetic food instead of their own honey and bee bread and are forced to fly in fields sprayed with pesticides. All this destroys the bees' healthy bacteria, which is their defense against disease, causing their honey and bee bread to lack in quality.* Wild bees that nest high up in trees and cliffs don’t suffer from any of these problems. Their honey stomachs are full of friendly bacteria and the honey and bee bread they produce are of superior quality — teeming with friendly bacteria, antioxidants and phytochemicals.*
- Our Bee Bread is totally raw, never heated or dried. It comes straight out of the hives and into the jars without any steps in between. We believe that bee bread should be as fresh as possible. Freshness ensures product integrity and biological efficacy. Drying is likely to impact its nutritional and therapeutic value, and is strictly avoided.
- Studies have identified unique lactic acid bacteria present in the honey and bee bread of Apis dorsata.*
- Sensitive crystallization is a qualitative method devised by a team of researchers that highlights the quality of biological substances. Researchers using this method said that wild bee bread from Apis dorsata was the most powerful substance they had tested for the past 11 years.*
- Wild (Apis dorsata) bee bread sourced by our honey hunters (from the same areas they use to harvest Rosita® Bee Bread), was previously compared to European (Apis mellifera) bee bread and won the best bee bread award in both a German Apitherapy Congress and a Romanian Apitherapy Congresses.*
- Rosita® Bee Bread has undergone a peer-reviewed scientific study that looked at the physicochemical and functional characteristics of bee bread from Europe and India, produced by Apis mellifera and Apis dorsata bees, respectively. Higher values for all parameters were quantified from bee bread and bee bread extracts from Apis dorsata bees. These values included total phenolic content, flavone/flavonols, flavanones, radical scavenging activity and total antioxidant power (the ability to scavenge reactive oxygen species associated with various diseases). The researchers suggested that the results could be explained by the multitude of botanical species present in the areas where Apis dorsata bee bread is harvested.*
- Rosita® Bee Bread has a unique taste, unlike any other bee bread out there! It tastes tangy, with citrus and fruit flavors and dissolves easily in the mouth.
- Wild forests are stressful environments for plants and produce chemical compounds, known as phytochemicals, which help protect the plant from attacks by insects and diseases. These phytochemicals are also present in the nectar collected and used by the bees to produce honey and bee bread. Therefore, wild bee bread and honey are rich sources of protective phytochemicals with a vast array of health-supporting properties.*
How do the bees create bee bread?
Bee bread is an “alchemical” bee creation. Foraging bees visit a variety of flowers and in the process, collect pollen grains. The bees mix the pollen with saliva and regurgitated nectar from their honey stomachs which are rich in lactic acid bacteria (LAB), including lactobacillus species.* This sticky pollen pellet, rich in LAB, is then attached to their hind legs for transport to the hive. In the beehive, the pollen pellets are packed into honeycomb cells and covered with honey.
Over some time, the bee bread undergoes a lactic acid fermentation similar to the process involved in forming yogurt (and other fermented milk products) and renders the pollen more digestible. The microbial species involved in this fermentation process also can produce enzymes, vitamins, antibacterial substances and organic acids.
The fermented bee pollen is now called “bee bread” and has a broad range of natural probiotic bacteria and enzymes. The fermentation process also explains why bee bread is slightly sour, because it contains lots of lactic acid produced by the LAB. Pollen sheaths are dissolved during the process of fermentation, rendering the bee bread more readily absorbable. Proteins are degraded to peptides and amino acids, starches are metabolized into simple sugars, and vitamins become more bioavailable.*