Hi All
 
After a while away I come back to a debate on propolis.
 
The odds: Coffee extract has over 800 easily detectable compounds
within it than can be expected to have biological activity. Of these
only a handful are well understood and their activities have been
characterised.
 
When you damage a tree you trigger it's defenses against attact - ie
it produces sap and resins -the resins contain stuff to kill
intruders usually bacteria, but also insects and possibly higher
animals. We have many things in common with insects, including the
fact that most insect poisons kill us too, and most things that cause
birth defects in insects do in us to. Plants produce poisons and
things that cause birth defects (teratogenic compounds) as a defence
so that something that is silly enough to eat a poisonous plant will
at least produce offspring that may be brighter or alternatively
dead.
 
If a beehive can forage anywhere withing 6 kilometers of a point, say
my back yard in urban Grahamstown, it means the bees could
concievably be collecting some sort of resin of anywhere over a 1000
species of plants (I live in a biolgically rich area). If these are
all half as creative as coffee, with say only 400 uncharacterised
compounds in them, that gives us 400 000 possible biologically active
compounds, many of which may be bad for us.
 
In short - I would only put propolis on my skin, as a topical, and
would never eat it unless I was sure where they were collecting the
stuff. I would stick to eating things nature wanted me to eat, rather
than stuff it produced to kill things that tried to eat it.
 
Keep well
 
Garth
Garth Cambray           Camdini Apiaries
15 Park Road
Grahamstown             Apis mellifera capensis
6139 South Africa
 
Time = Honey