“ROYAL JELLY”

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 July 1929, Page 10

“ROYAL JELLY”

SUPER : MEN POSSIBILITIES Does the lowly but industrious honey bee possess the secret of longevity which, properly applied, may add .centuries to man’s normal life and several feet to his stature? Medical science; alert to the possibilities which may lurk in the most commonplace phases of plant and animal life, is taking steps to find out. Its task will be to discover the elemental content of royal jelly, that predigested semi-liquid upon which queen bees are nurtured to maturity and which, apparently, produces a life span six to eight times greater than that of the ordinary honey makes. Another step will be to discover if royal jelly, so potent as bee food, is capable of similar chemical reaction upon the human body. If so, a third task will be to discover a means of manufacturing synthetic royal jelly in volume sufficient to moet tlio vust demand that would follow. Dr. Frederick C. Banting and Professor H. F. Jackson, of the University of Toronto, have accepted the task of investigating the life-prolong-ing possibilities of royal jelly. The appearance of a freak queen bee in a hive belonging to one of the leading apiarists in Canada is responsible for the research movement. For years apiarists have known that in the egg and larva or grub form there is no distinction between those bees destined to be queens and those which are to become workers, diet after hatching determining the ultimate result, but in maturity the difference in appearance is so marked as to be unmistakable. “This bee,” its owner told a “TitBits” representative, “bore chaiacteiistics of both species, which recalled.

to mind the doctrine that insect nursemaids of the hive determine which shall be queens and which workers merely by the structure of the cell in which the old queen has laid her egg and the type of. food fed in the nurs-

ing. “What are the elements in this strange royal jelly, which, when fed to a bee larva, makes a queen of her, with a life span of from three to five years, while a worker bee, which gets none of the royal jelly during the development period, grows to a size hardly two-thirds that of the queen and ordinarily lives only a single season?

“Undoubtedly the secret of the queen bee’s high development and long life lies in the food given her by the bee nursemaids.” Naturalists who have made a study of the honey bee have found the insect participating in a social life surprisingly parallel to that of humanity. The queen demands greatest interest. Hers is the task of maintaining and increasing the hive’s population.

At the height of her career she deposits from three to four thousand eggs a day. Years ago it was believed the queen determined which' should be drones, which workers, and which queens by a selective system, laying the type of egg she desired.. It has since been established, however, that her eggs are of only two types. Unfertilised eggs produce the males or drones. Fertile eggs produce the females. The food given grubs from the latter determines whether they shall become the under-developed workers or the fully-developed queen bees. The larva appears within three or four days of laying of the egg. It grows like any insect grub, and as it touches the sides of its cell, which is a part of the comb containing the regular honey cavities, coils into a

crescent and floats in the deposit of food inserted by the nursemaid bees. After six days the grubs diet is changed. Larvae in the queen cells, which are larger and more cuplike than the others, are fed the concentrated, rich, masticated royal jelly. Those in worker cells are fed ordinary “bee bread.” The result is atrophy, or a stunting process. The young queen bees are pampered, petted and spoiled, and hedged about by restrictions. They are kept prisonei’ within their cells, being fed their daily rations of royal jelly by attendants through a small hole in the wax door.

Francois Huber, the blind S.wiss naturalist of a century ago, was perhaps the first to discover the mysterious alchemy of royal jelly. He kidnapped the queen bee of a hive and waited.

He was surprised to find workers

immediately turned attention to the cell of a worker grub, enlarged and remodelled it, and began feeding the grub royal jelly. Their purpose was obvious. Deprived of their monarch,

they were taking a short cut toward obtaining- a new one... Huber waited several days, then returned the stolen queen to the hive. Workers immediately cancelled royal diet for the luckless grub, carried away the jelly, and reinstituted the ordinary worker menu.

Since Huber’s time apiarists have conducted more complete experiments, allowing the workers to feed royal jelly to the bee’s maturity, and have been surprised to find that the young worker grub actually becomes, to all intents and purposes, a queen bee.

Fed with this mysterious food, a queen bee’s life is, in length, three times that of a drone and from .five to fifteen times that of a worker. In addition, a queen bee is almost twice the size of a worker and a third again as large as a drone.

Transfer that ratio to mankind. What have we? A vision of men growing to nine ‘feet in height a third to a half again as strong as they now are, and with-life spans of from 250 to 1,000 years!