by Paige Wiren
Chronic back pain? Inflammation? One Utah beekeeper says his bees can provide alternative, effective relief with no side-effects.
When people talk about bee stings it’s usually about how to treat the area that’s been stung, but a more unusual and curious conversation revolves around how to treat an area of the body with a bee sting, turning the proverbial victim into willing participant.
Bee sting, or bee venom therapy is the intentional application of a live honeybee to a specific target on the body, the objective being to prompt the bee to sting the subject so that the person receives a dose of venom.
Neil Shelley, a Bee Keeper
Apitherapy is the general term used to denote the medicinal use of bee products, but the word is often associated with the particular practice of bee venom therapy. Like so many other kinds of natural therapies, apitherapy is not a newly developed form of treatment. Doctors in China have been treating patients for, and this is what we read all the time, thousands of years. And, as is also true with western developments of millennially-tested medical practices, there were a few American doctors that explored apitherapy in the 19th and 20th centuries, but, also typical, it never was adopted by mainstream medicine.
Fast forward to the 21st century, where modern technology allows us to access and share information about ancient ways, a coupling of factors that explains the resurgence of the practice of bee venom therapy. In fact, fast forward to the 21st century to Pleasant Grove, Utah, where bee keeper Neil Shelley lives and raises hives.
An avid lay entomologist, Shelley decided seven years ago to try keeping bees, a hobby that has grown into a cottage industry and experimental practice. Through his business, Wild Attitude Apiaries, Shelley sells bee products, such as honey, pollen and propolis, as well as his all-natural, made-to-order lotions, lip balms and soaps. The other service he offers is bee venom therapy.
Neil, a curious academic, has been administering stings for two years.
“I don’t proclaim something unless I’ve seen it firsthand or experienced it firsthand,” Shelley affirms, and he has done both.
Used historically for treating chronic inflammatory disorders, Neil has applied stings to people suffering from bursitis, which, he says, “has been very successful,” and has stung people with arthritis, “with mixed results.”
He also employs venom for alleviating his own back pain, noting that when the sting is applied at night he wakes up the next morning pain free.
Cursory internet research yields descriptions of the therapeutic use of bee venom that say “apitherapy claims to…,” and “all accounts are anecdotal.” If a treatment works, it works, whether the medicine has been scientifically studied and medically proven, or has demonstrated successful outcomes documented in a collection of empirical stories.
Apitherapy is not FDA approved, nor are pharmaceutical companies clambering to fund research. Why?
“You can’t patent bee venom so there’s no profit in it for the drug companies,” Shelley matter-of-factly answers.
The active component in bee venom is mellitin, an anti-inflammatory, which is why it is used to treat inflammatory as well as auto-immune disorders and chronic pain. Bees’ venom will have different potencies in relation to the seasons.
“Your bees going into the fall, from the late summer hatch are going to be ‘hotter’ because their venom is more powerful,” Shelley explains. So, too, will the environment’s available forage. Since a bee’s venom is the insect’s defense mechanism, it makes sense that those that need to compete more for food will cultivate a more effectual chemical weapon.
The stinging process is relatively simple. After Neil identifies where on the subject the sting will be applied, he collects bees in a small, modified mason jar.
“When bees hit a certain age, they’re assigned different functions. I want forager or guard bees from outside the hive, because they’re older and their venom is more effective.”
He then uses reverse tweezers to pick a bee from the jar, positions the insect over the identified point, and gently pushes the bee’s abdomen. The pressure produces an automatic sting response and the barb penetrates the skin pulsing venom into the epidermis. For good measure, Neil squeezes on the gland on the exposed tip of the stinger to make sure all the venom is used.
“I leave it alone for about five minutes, because that’s how long it takes for the mechanism to deliver the venom.”
Neil then removes the stinger and humanely disposes of the bee since in losing the stinger the bee will “bleed out.” (Bees have hemolymph, an invertebrate fluid equivalent to human blood, but bees have an open circulatory system.)
“Most people will spend more time getting worked up about how much it’s gonna hurt than how much it actually hurts.” But it’s not pleasant. “It’s like being pierced by a really fine needle, or kind of like a stinging nettle, only much more intense.” §
One thing I don’t like about the article is the promotion of killing bees. Bees die when their stinger is used to sting. There is already an issue with bees disappearing and it doesn’t appear that the cause is fully known. As bees are pollinators of food we need to survive not to mention many flowering plants in general…. I don’t agree with encouraging the use of bees in a way that kills them. my 2 cents. Jake
Just picked up a copy of Utah Stories, and I was so frustrated by what I read I had to come here to comment.
This article is dangerous and misleading.
Setting aside for the moment that being used by pre-scientific healers does not grant any treatment much clout, the author misleadingly implies that bee sting therapy was used by doctors in China for “thousands of years,” when in actuality it was another form of apitherapy (honey, which does actually have empirical evidence of efficacy).
But the most troubling aspect is this paragraph:
… No. Just, no. First off, “cursory internet research” found me three clinical trials on bee sting (they’re even referenced on the Wikipedia page, which this article links to!), none of which showed the therapy to be effective. Rather than discussing that fact, though, the author here basically says that science is a waste of time: We don’t need our medicine to be “medically proven.” We don’t need empirical evidence. Who needs double-blind, placebo-controlled science? We can just come up with some novel “treatment,” copy a dodgy backstory to make it sound old and/or mystical, and claim it can treat x, y, and z with no credible evidence to back it up!
I’m no defender of “Big Pharma.” Yes, their goal is to make money. Sometimes they do shady things. That’s why rigorous scientific and regulation (such as by the oh-so-dreaded FDA) is so important. Otherwise, pharmaceutical companies could just trot out a few pieces of anecdotal evidence without accounting for confounding factors like confirmation bias and the placebo effect, and make tons of money from unproven treatments. Yet this is exactly the sort of thing that the author appears to be endorsing.
Does bee-sting therapy work? It’s certainly more plausible than many other forms of alt-med (such as homeopathy), though every high quality (placebo-controlled, double-blind) study so far has shown no efficacy. Maybe it will bear fruit some day in clinical studies. But until then, I know I’ll invest my money in treatments that have been shown to be effective.
Thank you for your well-balanced comments and I appreciate your taking the time to write. I did not mean to indicate that anecdotal evidence should be a replacement for scientific study or that medical science is irrelevant. I intended to convey that if a treatment, no matter what it is, is effective for someone and they reap positive results from that treatment, i.e., it “works,” that’s a good thing for the person seeking treatment and that I, personally, would not grant privilege to the rating on a scale of the method or procedure based on how close to or far away from the scientific method of investigation the rating is. In prefacing my viewpoint by noting positive-result accounts are “anecdotal” I was hoping that it would be clear I was not saying bee venom therapy works…or doesn’t work. There are people who receive the therapy who claim that it is effective for them. -Paige Wiren
Reply from the Editor of Utah Stories Richard Markosian:
Patrick — I think you are over-reacting. How many “scientific clinical trials” of big pharma drugs have later proven to be harmful or even deadly?
I would trust much more a natural remedy from an insect, that has been used for many years, than chemicals that are never found in nature whose origins come from tampering with molecules in synthetic manner never found in nature.
I believe it is a serious problem with our society that so many people have such faith and confidence in big pharma and modern medicine treatments; And suspect notions of simple methods of treatment (from herbs, insects etc.) that have been used in especially Eastern Europe and Asia for hundreds of years.