PROPOLIS

Propolis is a resinous, sticky, strongly flavoured, differently coloured (brown-greenish) substance, harvested by bees from the buds and the bark of trees, it is very important both for the bees colony and for people’s health, it is considered the miraculous product in the beehive, discovered and used by people as a healing substance for milleniums.

Bees will use it to “lacquer” the cells where they are going to bring up the sapling, to “paint” the walls of the beehive, to “cement” or “attach” the honeycombs to the wooden frame, to close up the splits of the beehive, to diminish the bee entrance or to cover different remainders that bees can’t carry out of the beehive. Here I would like to give you an example I have read about in books and that I have met in the apiary throughout the years. If a little mouse enters the beehive, it is pricked with venom and killed. Being too big to be carried out of the beehive, its body is covered with a layer of propolis. “Embalmed” like this, it does not disintegrate and the putrefaction of the tissues does not take place for a long time (the specialty books mention 5 – 6 years).

Propolis has as main sources: the secretion of plants, the resins in the bark of trees, the poplar buds, the birch tree buds, those of chestnut trees, willow trees, hazelnut trees, fir trees, plum trees, elm trees, oak trees, ash trees, etc.

One may think that due to so many types of source plants, there are different types of propolis, still, no matter the origin, propolis has similar effects.

PhD Engineer: Cornelia Dostetan (Abalaru)