Why Royal Jelly is So Expensive | So Expensive Food | Insider Business

and now people are eating it too for 125 dollars per pound but harvesting this Elixir can be painstaking and can only be done by hand if it's done incorrectly young queen bees can be killed in the process so is royal jelly really worth it and why is it so expensive [Music] has been harvesting royal jelly for decades [Music] foreign [Music] season rapeseed flowers have bright yellow

petals that are wide at the tip allowing bees to collect more nectar and pollen than other flowers it's during this time that the Beehive population is largest and most productive which is ideal for harvesting lots of high quality royal jelly zorchunk traveled 600 kilometers to get here in shayang County Hubei Province to raise his bees he arrived four months ago and today he's starting to harvest

royal jelly what are you doing [Music] there are three types of bees born in the hive workers which are sterile female bees drones the male bees and queens which are the fertile female bees as larvae all bees grow in these tiny cells and consume royal jelly but once the queen emerges only she is allowed to feed on it beekeepers like maximize royal jelly production by removing

the queen he will place it in a separate part of the Box away from the hive the bees will work quickly to feed all the potential Queen larvae it takes workers 72 hours to fill the larvae cells with jelly zua Chung also creates multiple artificial cells which he fills with fresh larvae taken from other hives foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] too much force can

destroy larvae all future Queens needs to keep them alive in the cells so he can get as much jelly as possible from the workers [Music] [Music] with 64 cells in each strip will fill thousands of Queen cells throughout the Harvest in exactly 72 hours zorchung checks on his boxes of hives he removes his cells from the hives and cuts off the beeswax seal on top of

each cell he needs to remove each lava from inside the jelly filled cell because of the tiny size of the larvae this task also must be done by hand there are many consumers who also purchase the larvae in fact the demand for Queen larvae is just as high as royal jelly you're wrong [Music] [Music] he now can sit and delicately collect the royal jelly from inside

each cell foreign [Music] has to empty at least 2 000 Queen cells yeah [Music] royal jelly sourced from rapeseed flowers here in Hubei can sell for over 250 dollars for a single kilogram abroad foreign this price discrepancy is their nutrients honey is mostly made up of sugar while royal jelly also contains proteins and other minerals most still unknown being richer in nutrients than honey has linked

royal jelly to a variety of health benefit claims like being an aphrodisiac or a key to long life but most have yet to be confirmed by scientific evidence these beliefs come from seeing what happens to the bees that consume royal jelly queen bees grow one and a half times larger than other bees they have a lifespan of seven years while a worker bee lives just six

months and they can lay up to 3 000 eggs in a single day while workers are infertile but that may not be linked to the lack of royal jelly at all a study has shown that a worker's diet of honey and pollen contains natural chemicals that make them infertile foreign [Music] royal jelly can be found in beehives all over the world but it's China where 90

of the world's production comes from production took off in the 1980s when Chinese beekeepers started using a variety of high yielding bee called apis mellifera lagustica spinola this special breed of royal jelly yielding honeybees helped ramp up production almost 2 000 over the past 40 years zorchung has been using these bees since he started beekeeping over 30 years ago yes [Music] [Music] regardless of the species

bees are under threat and because of the great number of larvae killed or eaten forcing bees to produce royal jelly has come under scrutiny while lab-grown royal jelly exists it does not have the same benefits as the natural product and it's even killed queen bees that fed on it the changing climate and the use of pesticides on crops are also causing bees numbers in China to

diminish rapidly [Music] pesticide use has become so rampant in parts of China that some Farmers have begun to pollinate by hands foreign [Music] that's a woman foreign [Music]