Talk:Honey bee

See also: other honey-producing hymenoptera? How many, and which ones?

Honey wasps (Brachygastra) and a few other hymenopteran species produce honey, but not in the kind of surplus that honeybees do. I sort of remember a bee researcher (Thomas D. Seeley?) writing about harvesting a few spoonfuls of honey from a bumblebee nest, and describing the flavor. Also dimly remembered are the ants who store honey in the distended abdomens of some of the workers, esteemed as a tasty snack by people living nearby. As User:Waspbeehybrid pointed out on their talk page, the ability to create honey may merit mention in this article.

What do other editors consider appropriate for this article's "See also" section? Just plain Bill (talk) 11:34, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

bee are the closest relative of wasp. So this is a theories that this honey wasp are the evolutionary link between wasp and bees Waspbeehybrid (talk) 13:24, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

All non-parasitic bumblebees and stingless bees produce honey. A few wasps do, as you note. What ants store is not honey, as honey is generally defined. That aside, I would say this article is already cluttered enough without tacking on a bunch more "see also" links. Dyanega (talk) 17:28, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Bees in the Sahara

According to some articles from 2010 there's a current Apis Mellifera presence in southwest Lybia, which is a bit beyond the distribution map shown on the page. passcod (talk) 08:52, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Informational

This article had a lot of informational detail right away at the beginning of the article. This draws in the readers and encourages them to read more. JulesJ2024 (talk) 03:28, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

propolis

Propolis is also touted as a health product. See, e.g., https://www.organicfacts.net › health-benefits › animal-product › propolis.html and https://www.medicalnewstoday.com › articles › propolis . Someone who can evaluate this should include it. Kdammers (talk) 21:07, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Those are spam sources not reliable for content concerning health or antidisease effects. There are no WP:MEDRS-quality reviews supporting any clinical uses of propolis. Zefr (talk) 22:20, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Here are what look to be good secondary sources discussing possible benefits of propolis:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378874107002474* (2007 review);

Arjun H. Banskota, Yasuhiro Tezuka, Shigetoshi Kadota

Recent progress in pharmacological research of propolis,

Phytotherapy Research:* Volume 15, Issue 7, 561-653, 15 August 2001, https://doi.org/10.1002/ptr.1029; G.A. Burdock,

Review of the biological properties and toxicity of bee propolis (propolis), Food and Chemical Toxicology,

Volume 36, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 347-363,

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0278-6915(97)00145-2. So, obviously, there are review articles discussing the possible health benefits of this substance.

• "ScienceDirect is a website that provides access to a large bibliographic database of scientific and medical publications of the Dutch publisher Elsevier. It hosts over 18 million pieces of content from more than 4,000 academic journals and 30,000 e-books of this publisher"(Wikipedia). "Phytotherapy Research is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing original research papers, short communications, reviews, and letters on medicinal plant research" (Wikipedia).

This older article (Ghisalberti, E. L. (1979). Propolis: A Review. Bee World, 60(2), 59–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/0005772X.1979.11097738) seems from the abstract to have tried to draw conclusions, but I can't afford the $68 for 48 hour access to it.

Even if propolis has no beneficial uses, the claims exist in no small number and should be discussed in our article -- even if only to be dispelled. Kdammers (talk) 22:15, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

See WP:MEDASSESS - none of the above sources would qualify for the top half of the pyramids, as the underlying studies were of poor quality. Your reports offered above are both out of date (WP:MEDDATE; within 5 years) and from non-clinical, traditional medicine journals which are not reliable for encyclopedic medical content.

The easiest screen to apply is the answer to 2 questions: 1) has an international clinical organization recommended propolis as anti-disease therapy?; 2) has any national regulatory agency approved propolis as an approved drug? No is the answer for both.

If we don't have a reputable WP:MEDRS review to state a health effect of propolis or refute it, we can't provide commentary to dispel the issue, WP:SYNTH. There are dozens of Wikipedia articles on plant or animal extracts, herbalism, and folk medicine practices that do not elaborate on the absence of verifiable therapeutic effects. Zefr (talk) 22:50, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Policy aside (which I happen to strongly agree with), any logical and sensible person can immediately see why we do not expect anyone to ever be able to document any meaningful property for propolis: because, by definition, propolis is not a single or uniform substance. It is a composite of whatever available plant resins happen to occur within proximity of a given honeybee hive, along with other random substances. Bees do not make propolis, they gather it from the environment. The propolis from two different honeybee hives will not have the same chemical properties. How can you do clinical replicates of a substance where no two samples are the same? The obvious answer is that you can't. Claiming that you can test for clinical properties of propolis is analogous to doing clinical trials of soil, or "grass", or pond water, or wood. It is an entirely unreasonable expectation. If you want to find plant resins with medical properties, then the correct procedure is to go to a plant, identify the plant, and test the substances produced by that plant. Testing random unidentified plant compounds gathered by bees gets you nowhere. Dyanega (talk) 23:07, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Just because surveys are old should not mean we shouldn't use them. The age is in there for validity purposes, but the number of older works and reviews indicates the interest in the topic. If we don't include this, we are, by default, misleading our readers. Also, I don't know anywhere in Wikipedia guidelines where it says articles cited have to come from "top of the pyramid" journals. (A lot of the ranking of journals has little to do with the quality of the articles and more to do with game playing.) The journals I cited seem to be reputable based on there introductory descriptions in Wikipedia. In any case, here is a more recent survey from a reputable journal ( "Trends in Food Science and Technology is a monthly peer-reviewed review journal covering food science and technology. It is an official publication of the European Federation of Food Science and Technology and of the International Union of Food Science and Technology."): Yanet Irigoiti, Alba Navarro, Diego Yamul, Carina Libonatti, Anahi Tabera, Marina Basualdo,

The use of propolis as a functional food ingredient: A review, Trends in Food Science & Technology,

Volume 115, 2021, Pages 297-306, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2021.06.041. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924224421004155). There are a number of other reviews in various journals that have been published within the last five years, including Felix Zulhendri, Rafael Felitti, James Fearnley, Munir Ravalia, The use of propolis in dentistry, oral health, and medicine: A review, Journal of Oral Biosciences,

Volume 63, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 23-34,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.job.2021.01.001.

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1349007921000013).

The fact that propolis, like grass, can vary does not in and of itself make studies of its properties invalid, any more than a study of grass in general is necessarily meaningless. To argue this would be original research. Rightly or wrongly, a significant number of researchers have studied propolis's properties, and more than a couple of teams have reviewed those studies.Kdammers (talk) 04:24, 24 May 2024 (UTC)