Many people are discovering the true benefits of the raw ingredients from the hive – royal jelly, beeswax, bee pollen, bee propolis and honey. The benefit which can be obtained from these products is not, however, universally available. The key with bee products is to find raw ingredients which have been processed using techniques which retain their nutrients and potency as health supplements.

Generally speaking, you can reduce your health products into one of four easy categories –

1 – Fresh/Raw foods

2 – Foods processed into vitamin supplement form.

3 – Herbs / Vitamins / Minerals processed into supplement form

4 – Chemically created vitamins and minerals which are manufactured entirely in a lab.

When you buy your multi-vitamin from one of the large chains, or even from your local vitamin shop, you’re generally buying something made up from numbers 3 and 4 above. Many of the vitamins and minerals listed on the label are chemicals created in processing facilities and are often combined in some way with naturally occurring forms of herbs, vitamins and minerals.

When you buy a standardized herbal product such as St. Johns Wort, or American Ginseng, then it is to be hoped that you’re buying something in category 3, and that what you’ve actually purchased contains what is stated on the label, and it is derived from some form of living plant matter or natural substance.

When you buy a good quality bee product, what you should be buying is something classified in #2 above, a food substance processed into a vitamin supplement. If you think about the extracts from the hive, they can each be scooped by hand from within the hive walls and consumed, right there, on the spot. Royal jelly is a thick, yellow liquid substance which can be eaten in its liquid form. Honey is similar, a more viscous substance, golden yellow in color, which can also be eaten straight from the hive. Bee pollen and beeswax too. Propolis needs to be separated to remove the plant debris, but it’s still technically a food.

Given this, bee products need to be handled carefully to retain their freshness, their potency and their nutritional integrity. One cannot assume however that this is how most manufacturers handle/process them. As with some foods, there’s often very little left, nutritionally speaking, once the packaged food arrives at your table.

With bee products, there’s an added layer of complexity – getting the water out of royal jelly quickly and without heat. Drying bee pollen granules to a semi-moist state and potentiating for digestive assimilation. Extracting the bioflavonoids and active compounds from propolis and discarding the plant debris and other waste. Reducing/removing the water from honey without raising the temperature above 130F.

These are complex processes and it is not unusual to find companies who take simple short-cuts. Using heat is the most expedient way to remove water from any product to be converted to a powder, and many companies choose this type of process at the expense of live enzymes and important nutrients.

So it’s essential that you take the time to learn where your supplements come from, just like it’s important to learn and control where your food comes from.

At TNS we use only those processes sympathetic with retaining the full nutritional complement of the raw ingredients intact. We sell our bee products direct to retail or via our wholesale program, and we stand by everything we say and do.

Contact us today and add wholesale bee products to your retail operation, or try them for yourselves by ordering a sample bottle online at The Natural Shopper.