Science: Russian Bees Are Very Good Bees

Bee-loud news buzzed from Moscow last week. Soviet scientists reported that they had found a way to make bees produce honey heavy with vitamins or with such medicines as quinine, sulfidin. The whole thing is managed by diet.

The cane sugar the bee gets from nectar is metabolized into honey sugars (glucose, levulose, dextrose). Honey normally has no vitamin C, and not much of any other vitamin.

Most apiarists have supposed that bees thrive only on nectar, but a Soviet bee student, E. Arefyeff of the Maikop Agricultural Research Station, thought of trying them on other foods. He fed them nectar, laced with essences of fruits, fruit-tree leaves, aromatic grasses like mint. The honeyed results were pleasing. Fruit-fed bees produced honey rich in vitamin C; mint-fed bees gave honey that had pleas ant fragrance as well as taste.

Then Arefyeff began to dose his bees with medicines. When he gave them a concoction of honey and quinine, they gave back quinine-loaded honey. The converted honey medicine proved easier for a human being to assimilate than the medicine itself.

Other Soviet experimenters have doctored bees with vitaminized syrups, vegetable juices, milk. Since honey is a good preservative, the honeyed juices thus produced keep their food values for long periods.