Woman Says Bees Are “God’s Gift To Us.”

“I think that bees are God’s gift to us,” Sophia Price told the Summerville-Trion Optimist Club Friday. She said that bees make something for people to eat and is the only insect that makes something for us to eat, Price told the group.
“It is not only edible, it is good for us,” she added. “There are 15 different vitamins and minerals in honey – so it is actually very nourishing.”
She said if you are lost or there is some type of disaster, and you find a bee tree, you can get the honey and you can get the pollen and the bee bread from the hive, you can actually survive without any other food.
“The only thing that you have to be careful about is if you eat too much of the bee bread – you have to go easy on it,” Price explained. “It might be hard if you are hungry.”
Honey is readily absorbed by the body.
To get a teaspoon of honey, it takes 12 bees their entire lifetime to make that much honey. They have two stomachs, one of which they use when they find a flower to bring back nectar to the hive. The worker bees are all girls. They go out and find the nectar or water, which they fill the little pouch to bring back to the hive.
They bring back the water and put it in the cell and sit there and fan their wings and maintain the temperature in that hive at 95 degrees, winter or summer. They will evaporate the moisture out.
When the bees first hatch out they have jobs and the first is a feeder bee, they feed the drones, they feed the queen bee. Drones can’t go out and bring back nectar because their drinking straw is too short. The queen, all she does is pop out eggs, Price continued. “That is all she does.”
The workers build the hive. They make all the decisions for the hive, they decide what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, where to go when they decide to swarm and decide when the queen is done. She has to lay about 1,500 eggs a day. If she doesn’t they decide they need another queen.
Sometimes the worker bees start exercising her by pulling her arms and her legs and moving her wings up and down. When she mates with a drone and has eggs, she is too heavy to fly.
Price says that many times if the bees decide to swarm, they won’t go far and light on something because the queen is too heavy to fly. She will rest and then they will get up and go further.
She said the worker bees are smart and bees are very hygienic – very clean.
Bees make something called propolis which, when Price first began having bees she would take it out of the hives and throw it away.
“Propolis is something natural that glues the hive together,” Price said. “They use it like we use duct tape. They put in cracks to keep out moisture.”
She said that if a bug or rat gets in the hive and dies, the bees will encapsulate them with the propolis.
Propolis has been used since the time of Socrates. Egyptians used it in embalming and Socrates used it in medicine. Parts of Europe use propolis all the time as a medicine, according to Price.
She went on to give details of the benefits of propolis as a medicine or salve.
“It is an incredible product that we didn’t know anything about,” she said.
“The reason we can’t use anything like that in this country is the FDA,” Price said. “Because you have no control on where a bee flies and what plants it visits.”
She said that propolis is made of plant and tree lava.
The bees add an enzyme when they bring it back to the hive and chew it up. It is then like taffy.
“It tastes awful,” Price said.
“Propolis itself is anti-fungal, anti-viral and anti-bacterial,” she explained. “There is no medicine on the American market that is all three.”
You can also use it topically use it as salves and creams.
Price said that beeswax is also a good product made by bees.
“They don’t even know what is in beeswax,” she said. “There are like a hundred components in beeswax, they only know what 51 of them are. They have no idea what the other 49 are.”
She went on to explain other uses for beeswax, propolis and royal jelly made by bees.
They even use the stinger for use with Lyme disease and Parkinson’s disease.
“If you are taking an antibiotic and take propolis with it, it makes the antibiotic 70 times more effective,” Price said. “it can’t be classified in this country as a medicine.”
She urged people not to use Chinese made propolis.
Price explained many more fascinating things about bees.
“The flavor of honey is based on the plants in the area,” she said.
Rhododendron and azaleas do not have nectar that is useful for human consumption and is not good.