Healing With Bees: My Journey Into Bee Venom Therapy

I began my journey to recover from the illness I'd suffered with for years more than half a decade ago.

The first thing that set me on the path was realizing that you can recover from disease (from almost any disease, it seems). The second step was discovering potential, unconventional ways to do it, and I found quite a few.

One of the first was an ancient healing method called apitherapy.

Apitherapy is a healing practice thousands of years old that uses various bee products, from honey, propolis, pollen, and royal jelly all the way to bee venom, to treat a wide range of illnesses.

The name comes from Greek: apis means bee, and therapy means healing.

Using venom for healing falls under a term called hormesis.

Hormesis (from the Greek hórmēsis, meaning rapid motion) is a term in toxicology for a phenomenon in which a small dose of a poison or toxin actually has a beneficial biological effect.

The idea is that the toxin triggers the body's defense and repair mechanisms, which manage to overcome the negative effect and even produce a benefit. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

The first physician to treat patients with bee venom was Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine (460–377 BCE). Ever since, throughout history, many doctors have treated patients with venom, conducted research, and written articles and books describing their successes in using it to treat a wide variety of diseases.

Bee venom therapy can help heal and relieve conditions considered incurable, diseases that modern medicine has found no solution for.

The main component of bee venom is melittin, which makes up 40–50% of the venom. Melittin stimulates the nervous system and activates it. It's an anti-inflammatory agent four times stronger than cortisone. It also has a protective effect on the proteins in blood plasma and influences blood clotting. Melittin suppresses the formation of free radicals, which are thought to contribute to health damage.

Other substances in the venom include neurotransmitters like dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin; substances that affect the heart and blood (cardiopeptide, histamine); anti-inflammatory substances (adolapin, melittin); and more.

The venom stimulates the immune system to act, and through that, to heal inflammation. It works directly by introducing anti-inflammatory substances that suppress inflammation throughout the body, and indirectly by stimulating the hypothalamus, which is responsible for the autonomic nervous system, the endocrine system, the response to stimuli, the regulation of bodily processes, and more. The venom activates many systems in the body, and that's why it's effective for treating so many diseases and symptoms.

I first experienced apitherapy with a woman who had healed herself from a severe autoimmune disease with the help of bees. Meeting her filled me with inspiration. Since I was living in New York at the time, I found a practitioner who guided me through the process. Encountering bees this way was about reconnecting with nature, with how I perceive nature and animals, a new understanding that everything happening in nature has a reason and that it all connects back to us as human beings.

That connection was so moving that I wasn't busy worrying about how my body would react. The stings hurt, but not too much. In the first few weeks the body responds to the stings with redness, localized heat at the sting site, and itching. After a few weeks the body started getting used to it. Every time I stung myself, my body received energy and I filled up with the belief that I was going to heal myself this way.

For most of my life I'd been conditioned to think that healing was something you get at a pharmacy, and suddenly, for the first time in my life, I understood my connection to nature, and that changed me completely.

During the months I worked with the bees and the substances they produce, I changed completely and grew stronger. And in the end, I fully healed myself.

Was it thanks to the bees? I can't say for certain, but I suspect there were many beneficial effects on my system. As someone who took medications for years that damaged his immune system, and as a person whom Western medicine told would be sick for the rest of his life, belief also carries enormous power.

And yet, anyone who wants to heal themselves, who takes responsibility for their life, who takes action and begins to perform acts of self-care, is already doing something tremendous for their health and growth. And when that happens, a person can't help but change other layers of their life too, mainly changes in lifestyle and nutrition. And those have an incredible capacity to improve our health, even to the point of recovery.