Abstract
Stingless bees are a type of honey producers that commonly live in tropical countries. Their use for honey is being abandoned due to its limited production. However, the recent improvements in stingless bee honey production, particularly in South East Asia, have brought stingless bee products back into the picture. Although there are many stingless bee species that produce a wide spread of products, known since old eras in traditional medicine, the modern medical community is still missing more investigational studies on stingless bee products. Whereas comprehensive studies in the current era attest to the biological and medicinal properties of honeybee (Apis mellifera) products, the properties of stingless bee products are less known. This review highlights for the first time the medicinal benefits of stingless bee products (honey, propolis, pollen and cerumen), recent investigations and promising future directions. This review emphasizes the potential antioxidant properties of these products that in turn play a vital role in preventing and treating diseases associated with oxidative stress, microbial infections and inflammatory disorders. Summarizing all these data and insights in one manuscript may increase the commercial value of stingless bee products as a food ingredient. This review will also highlight the utility of stingless bee products in the context of medicinal and therapeutic properties, some of which are yet to be discovered.
Highlights
Stingless bees (Meliponines) belong to the genus Apidae, which is a family of social bees from the superfamily Apoidea
Stingless Bee Propolis (SBP) is not as commonly known for its antimicrobial properties as propolis from honey bees, Pino et al have shown that the SBP from Melipona beecheii have higher content of trans-verbenol, α-copaene, β-caryophyllene, β-bourbonene, α-pinene, spathulenol, β-pinene and caryophyllene oxide compared to propolis from A. mellifera, despite both being collected from one region (Yucatán, Mexico) with similar natural flora [120]
Honey is the best known primary product of stingless bees in terms of purity and availability, whereas other stingless bee products are less common, here we focus on SBH and its promising opportunities
Summary
Stingless bees (Meliponines) belong to the genus Apidae, which is a family of social bees from the superfamily Apoidea. To date there are more than 500 known stingless bee species, of which approximately 40 species have good potential as honey producers [3,4]. These species are distributed in the tropical and subtropical regions as follows: approximately 391 species in the Neotropical region of South America, 60 in the Indo-Malayan region. Menezes et al have suggested a good method for harvesting unfermented pollen from stingless bees by moving a colony of stingless bees to a another location and stimulate the foragers to accept a new hive, build new pots and leaving the old hive empty [22]. This standard set the microbial contaminant with total plate count limits at 1 × 103 CFU/mL, whereas yeast, mold and coliforms must be less than 1 × 101 CFU/mL [23]
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