Bee-io save bees by developing the world's cleanest honey

 24th November, 2022

Did you know that the primary purpose of honey is to supply the bees with carbohydrates as well as other vital elements like amino acids, antioxidants, and natural antibiotics? In fact, a lot of vegans steer clear of honey since industrial honey production may be bad for bees. Many vegans don't differentiate amid beekeeping and other categories of animal rearing. Many commercial bee farmers use methods that, by vegan standards, are unethical in order to maximise earnings. By rejecting honey and other bee products including honeycomb, bee pollen, royal jelly, and propolis, vegans choose to protest these exploitative practises.

However, the Bee-io Honey team, a business established in 2021, has been reversing this by creating cultured honey. Their vegan honey is produced in a lab in the Rehovot Science Park utilising bee protein and organic plant nectar. Continue reading for more information about this amazing golden syrup.

Need for vegan honey

The antibacterial, antiviral, and anti-fungal properties of honey make it an excellent source of many nutritional components, such as vitamins, minerals, calcium, and antioxidants. Food and cosmetic products containing honey, such as sweeteners and serums, have also been in high demand, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The seven species of bees, nevertheless, who now command the attention of pollinators, have a lot of work to do as a result. Additionally, as those species perish from pesticides, illnesses, and climate change, it becomes more challenging for the remaining bee species to replace their populations. Hence, vegan honey is the need of the hour today.

Bee-io Honey’s unique concept

Cultured honey, according to Ofir Dvash, the CEO of the innovative startup, doesn't include antibiotics, pesticides, chemicals, or poisons. It eliminates the requirement for using bees while enabling on-demand production independent of the time of year, the weather, or climate change! After merging with shell company Whitestone group, the business has been trading on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange since May under the ticker BHNY with a $11 million market cap. Bee-io already has six patents filed in the United States regarding the various processes and technologies that they are developing in honey.

An insight into their innovative process

In addition to successfully completing an experiment demonstrating the protein's antibacterial characteristics, Bee-io was successful in manufacturing cultured royal jelly protein in an accurate fermentation process using a bioreactor as a preliminary stage or mass production. They created a really special technology that enables them to replicate the production process of real honey. They don't need to employ bees because they can make proteins in microbes utilising fermentation techniques and bioreactors, according to Dvash.

The bees that visit flowers and consume their nectar have a unique stomach, which produces enzymes in the body before putting them in the stomach with the nectar. As various sugars are broken down, honey is produced, which the bee regurgitates into the honeycomb afterwards. In order to create a product that is nearly identical to true honey, they are recreating the process [with plant nectar and protein from bees], adds Dvash.

The USP of their honey

"Nectar content in coffee plant blossoms is incredibly low. And just a few locations are used for coffee farming. As a result, not much coffee honey is produced. Nature cannot create enough even if we try. With the help of our technologies, we can offer exotic honey at a reasonable price to the general people. We remove the negative qualities that are now prevalent in natural honey that we purchase from supermarkets, so our honey only has the positive aspects,” he says.

“We have a variety of plants and flowers from which to pick, and we can create honey without the use of pesticides, antibiotics, or botulism,” according to Dvash. The objective is to introduce a wide variety of honey products, such as lavender honey, Camila honey, and even coffee-flavored honey, to their store.