What is royal jelly?

Royal jelly, also known as royal jelly, bee milk, is a natural nutritional tonic. Royal jelly is the milky white or light yellow material secreted from the royal plasma gland of the head after the young worker bees eat pollen and honey, which is used to feed queen bee and bee larvae. Only at low temperature production, processing, storage, transportation of royal jelly can be called fresh royal jelly. Only fresh royal jelly preserves the active substance and nutritional value.

It is a pearly white or pale yellow-coloured cohesive mixture of honey and secretions from the hypopharyngeal and mandibular glands of worker honeybees. It contains moisture or water (60-70 per cent), lipids (1-10 per cent), minerals (0.8-3 per cent), proteins (9-18 per cent), sugar (7 per cent) and other elements. Being highly nutritious, this substance is used as food to young larvae and adult queen honeybees.

Commercially, royal jelly is produced artificially by stimulating bee colonies to produce queen bee, grown outside its natural habitat. The larvae in the queen cells are fed with nutritious royal jelly. The perfect time to harvest royal jelly is when the maximum amount gets accumulated upon the larva turning 5 days old.