Queen bee jelly
Media
Part of Panorama
- Title
- Queen bee jelly
- Creator
- Theimer, Walter
- Language
- English
- Year
- 1961
- Rights
-
- Fulltext
- queen bee jelly Walter Theimer The Larva Must Be Very With a view, not to men readily Rowing^2^ t0 which the action oi as well as me f rpadilv swallowing cirugs " ..k... S'“ as? asasr#j Rembold of the Max PlancK Laboratory of Biochemie Munich, has had a closer look at royal jelly. The juice is ac tive only if the bee larva is jars of the jelly will be of no avail; the larva becomes a common worker bee. So de termination of future develop ment is effected at a very early stage. Basically every bee larva has the elements in it to become a queen but with normal nutrition their growth remains inhibited in favour of development into a worker bee. Only royal jelly, admin istered early, triggers royal development. So the action of the juice depends on very par ticular conditions even in the bee. About one-third of one gram of the yellowish, milky (Continued on page 91) common larva .. otherwise develop into an or dinary worker bee. For a de cade or so, this nutritious juice- has been advertised,as a tonic and rejuvenant fo£ men; its manufacture and sale have proved lucrative, busn i^roposigons, toejuKe.^ as regards the value 01' this substance to men jhough oc casionally7 some doctors have reported to have seen tonic effects on the well-being of patients taking royal jelly. Such observations are always somewhat hazy. There is an undeniable share of psycholo-gical factors resting on a pre existing belief in the juice. Even generous interpretation of findings on the jelly fails to reveal any effects exceed ing those that have been ac hieved in mass experiments by administering placebos, if these had previously been suggestively described to the laity as medically active. 2 Panoram* QUEEN BEE... (Continued from page 2) jelly can be obtained from the cell of a royal larva. Nurse bees produce it in their glands. The cell of a worker bee larva contains only the sixtieth part of this amount of food jelly. It might seem that it is only the quantitative multiplication of the food which makes a queen bee out of the larva; an alternative would be to assume a diffe rent qualitative composition of workers’ and queens’ jel lies. Dr. Rembold’s analysis shows that both quantitative and qualitative influnces are at work, the latter being pro bably more important. Promotion of Metabolism Royal jelly must contain substances promoting metabo lism. The metabolic perform ance of queen bees is stagger ing. Within a week the royal larva grows to 2500 times its initial weight. The adult queen bee which also feeds on royal jelly lays an egg every 20 seconds, its daily pro duction reaching 2000 eggs a day during the main laying season. Now one substance known to promote metabolism has been found at Munich in royal jelly in ten times the concentration it has in wor ker bees’ jelly. It is panto thenic acid, also known ,as vitamin B 5. If it is tried, however, to produce queens by adding pantothenic acid to worker bees’ jelly, the out come is negative. Pantothenic acid plays only an auxiliary part, while the real causal fac tor must be different. Another compound, known as biopterin, is also concent rated in royal jelly ten times stronger than in worker bees’ jelly. Again it proves impos sible to make a queen bee by adding biopterin to workers’ food. The physiological signi ficance of biopterin is uncer tain. It would seem that it has to do with the longevity of the queens, since the win ter generation of worker bees, whicn also receives an in creased ration of biopterin, lives much longer than sum mer bees do. Man excretes appreciable amounts of this vitamin, related to folic acid, without any specific effects being known. In the queen bee even biopterin is just one of the auxiliaries kept ready by nature to engineer the ex traordinary metabolism of the queen bee once a queen bee has come into existence; but the auxiliary substance does not produce the queen bee. A Preservative Acid Royal jelly has an aromatic smell and is viscous. It con tains 60 per cent of water and 10 per cent of lipoids, fat-like compounds among which Dr. December 1961 91 Rembold found a new fatty acid previously unknown. To gether with Professor Butenandt, the famous biochemist in charge of the Munich re search institution, Dr. Rem bold found the chemical cons titution of the new acid. To the chemist it is 10-hydroxydecene-2-acid. It occurs only in the honey bee, yet worker bees’ jelly contains just as much of it as royal jelly does. So * even this acid cannot be the miraculous agent making a queen bee, and it has to content itself with the more modest task of acting as a pre servative for the jelly. * A Cool Jelly Makes a Hof Bee An American scientist, N. Weaver, succeeded some time ago in breeding queen bees from ordinary workers’ larvae in an incubator by feeding royal jelly to them. But if the jelly had been stored in a re frigerator for1 some while its action decreased; only a few larvae grew into queen bees, the rest forming intermediate stages including a giant wor ker bee. Dr. Hanser of the Munich laboratory has now succeeded in making ’queen bees out of common larvae in the incubator even with royal,J jelly kept in cold storage for a year. The juice had been cooled deeply immediately on obtaining it, the main con deration being prevention denaturation of the sensiti proteins. It has now becoB obvious that the decisi agent in royal jelly is staq enough to keep for sob length of time, which rais hopes for the possibility isolating it. It may yet be hi den inside the protein fn tion. Even proteins seeming equal in their general chej ical nature and behavio may be very different as i gards the sequence and a rangement of their basic uni' These subtle dif ferenc which scientists are only b ginning to disclose by lab rious analytical techniqu play a vital part in biolog The substances in questic can also be nucleic acids compounds of such acids ai proteins. The chances are th compounds of high molecul weight, with manifold posf bilities of coding constructs data in the arrangement their units, are the controllii agent in royal jelly. The Munich researches wl be the starting-point for fu ther experiments with jelli< deliberately varied in the composition. This methc may help to find the respoi sible factor in royal jell within the foreseeable futur * * 92 Panoram