Harvesting Royal Jelly

All beekeepers love their bees and want to take care of them.  All harvesting, be that for honey, beeswax, or royal jelly is done in a minimally invasive manner so as not to disrupt the hive.  Ted has not run across any beekeepers that don’t share that value and he’s been in this business for many years.

The basic process for harvesting royal jelly includes maintaining a “Queenless” hive perpetually.  The hive is then always trying to produce a new Queen.  On the 8 ^th day of larvae development, roughly 45 larvae are removed and royal jelly harvested (note that this is out of a colony of 50,000 bees).  After that the cycle would restart with the hive trying to develop new queens again.

A queen bee can lay 3,000 eggs a day. One hive producing royal jelly uses 45 queen cups with 45 larvae. This emulates the natural process of a beehive where the hive produces somewhere between12 and 35 (up to 100) queen cells that have the same amount of larvae in them. The first queen that hatches kills all the other queens before they hatch or either they fight to the death if they hatch at the same time. These would be pupated bees that are well past the larva stage. 

In the natural process, all these larvae would hatch and then fight to the death with only 1 surviving.  See the link below for an outline of the process.

https://www.wikihow.com/Harvest-Royal-Jelly

The hive producing royal jelly is well taken care of but yes there are 45 larvae that are discarded during the process. The 30-40,000 bees in the colony are certainly maintained and treated well.  Our position is that this is not an unethical process and is no more disruptive than harvesting honey.