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Bee Venom Has "Botox-Like Effect," Is Worth 7 Times As Much As Gold
dryriver writes "The BBC reports that cosmetic products using bee venom as an ingredient are a new 'hot seller' in the cosmetics market. Bee venom is said to have an effect on female skin similar to Botox injections, tightening the skin and making wrinkles and other signs of aging appear less pronounced than before. Unlike Botox, however, bee venom does not need to be injected, and can be absorbed through the skin naturally as an ingredient of cosmetic skin creme. Now comes the kicker: A special electrified device that causes bees to sting a synthetic membrane and release their venom can harvest about one gram of bee venom from 20 bee hives. That one gram of bee venom is worth a whopping 350 dollars. This makes bee venom almost seven times more valuable than gold, which, in comparison, is worth only about 53 dollars per gram."
Then why not just use Botox?
I think we've finally found the real reason why honey bees are disappearing.
hmmmm....bees go missing, venom worth more than gold...
What's the connection I'm not seeing???
slow day, eh?
It would be a real downer if you electrified and killed your entire hive. If not, I can see a new industry of steeling other people's bee sting toxin and an ancillary industry of armed bee hive guards.
I mean just look at what nanotechnology has brought us so far! Um, oh wait...
You mean something like a handheld computer that can make phone calls, surf the internet, play games, and all weighs less than a pound? Oh, and is so ubiquitous that even your grandma might have one?
:(
If only that had happened we could say nanotechnology was a success
Instead of producing it from bees for $350/g, you could put the appropriate genes into some E. coli and have them produce it for 20% of that price or less. But of course then you wouldn't be able to sell it for $350/g.
Bee's die after stinging, which means that you're losing twenty hives of bees for only $350. That sounds like a huge loss to any bee keeper. That also seems like a hell of a lose of bees that are already suffering from sudden colony collapse... Am I wrong here?
leave them bee!
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
I've gotta stock up on bee venom quick! Before we fall over the fiscal cliff!
What could possibly go wrong
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
Some of them will make claims that sound superficially similar, but which will really produce the "Buttocks like effect" rather "Botox like effect".
"This makes Bee Venom almost seven times more valuable than Gold, which, in comparison, is worth only about 53 Dollars per 1 gram."
So it costs the same as ink for my printer, data for my cellphone, gas for my car (soon), and clean drinking water (later).
...omphaloskepsis often...
your celphone is not nanotech
I asked my "doctor" to inject BOTOX into my sphincter to remove the wrinkles but he refused. Hopefully I can use this => http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/12/24/0056235/bee-venom-has-botox-like-effect-is-worth-7-times-as-much-as-gold to improve the appearance of my puckered asshole.
...apk
APK
P.S. => I already wax and bleach my asshole and encourage everyone else to do the same.
Man, I wonder how much and what animal venom they use in my ink jet printer cartridges...
does it work on neckbeards??
Processors with traces measured in nanometers ftw. That's what enables small technology, and very high performance tech too.
I promise. And pretty girls can have it for free. Just pump the dispenser.
I'm tired of seeing paralysed faces in the persuit of looking beautiful. Considering people are willing to inject BOTULISM into their faces to look better, a replacement was direly needed.
I'm glad bee venom is worth something, perhaps it will inspire people to try stave off the great bee die off. However I don't give a damn what wasp, hornet, or yellow jacket venom is worth, if I see one in the wrong place it's going to die a horrible death. Dammit
Finally, a use for those african killer bees.
Perhaps due to limited / patent-restricted availability of the extraction method.
The price will likely decrease, when owners of large bee colonies start figuring out ways of capitalizing on this.
Or when biotech folks come up with a way of producing "synthetic" bee venom, grown by bacteria infused with genes extracted from the bees.
There are a ton of products more valuable than gold. I don't understand why that is a big deal. Hopefully this makes honey cheaper with the extra source of income.
I just saw fresh whole (not ground) wasabi root for sale in a Japanese market in Los Angeles for $149 a pound. A one inch diameter piece 3/4 inch long was around $9. The second most expensive food I found was Spanish Blue Fin tuna for $55 a pound.
Why is Snark Required?
And you thought bee venom was expensive? Just wait until you see the prices of HP 3D Printer Bee Venom Cartridges.
Well, this will certainly aggravate the Vegans, who believe that honey is not "vegan" because we are enslaving the bee.
http://www.vegetus.org/honey/honey.htm
Though I'm sure they happily eat fruits and vegetables that are pollinated with domesticated bees that farmers have "enslaved"...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I don't understand this gold thing against which the commercial value of this bee sting is being compared. Please express this in terms of:
1. Bags of potato fries (for fitness conscious folks) /. (I wish this one was)
2. The average software patent (for nerds like us)
3. Members of the senate (who care so much for us)
4. iPhones (everyone seems to want one)
5. Windows 8 licenses (see above)
6. First posts on
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
That must be what they use to make inkjet printer ink.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
Bee's venom can kill by inducing shock in allergic subjects.
It looks like it has a very nasty property of being a potential allergenic (I hope I got the correct term. If not, sorry) meaning: once you get stinged, you may become allergic to venom even if before you weren't. This in sufficently predisposed subjects.
And now it is going to be the golden ingredient for some cosmetic? I hope it is going to be subjected to some form of medical control, to say the least.
But I'm no chemist nor biologist so I may be completely wrong.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
This reminds me of an urban legend (or maybe I just watched it on Fox) about some guys basically stinging their penis with bee's to make it swell up.
Wow! That makes it worth almost 1 percent its weight in inkjet printer ink.
This space available.
That's FAD-tastic. I'm sure that'll be around a while.
I imagine that people with serious bee sting allergies are best advised to avoid this treatment.
to have an effect on female skin
Male skin is not affected, thusly.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
There was a fascinating Sherlock Holmes based science fiction story, that Holmes retired to study beekeeping and discovered an elixir of life.The side effects were complex, and did not suggest that it as a popular treatment.
Now we know who's been stealing all those bees that have been "Disappearing" around the world ;-)
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Yes, comparing things that can send coded photons to something that is supposed to make matter makes perfect sense.
You, know, just monkey around with their DNA a bit, to produce bees that pump out a gallon or four liters of venom per sting?
This is done in bad science fiction films all the time. Start doing underground nuclear tests again with beehives. Or zap them with Gamma Rays.
But be careful not to get them too angry.
And tell chicks that want better skin to just go stick their heads in a beehive.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
*whispers*: Platypus venom.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Botox injections, tightening the skin and making wrinkles and other signs of aging appear less pronounced...
Botulinum toxin does not tighten the skin - it paralyses muscles, and since many wrinkles are aggravated by muscles in the skin, paralysing them can make the wrinkles less pronounced. This paralysis is very evident on the faces of many aging celebrities - they simply struggle with producing facial expressions.
It's a strange thing, isn't it? Instead of accepting their age, people mistreat themselves so they look 'younger', at least when you're not too close. I think it is deeply sad; and it only makes you look less attractive.
The Wasp Woman: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054462/
speak to the devil. this is what I was telling my co workers and I wonder if they saw this is Unlock Blackberry 9800
Nevertheless you parent is right, it is not nanotech ;D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Everything and it's dog is nanotech since the definition shifted. Sunscreen gets called nanotech just because it has sub-micron particles suspended in it. So while it may not fit your definition or mine, it's shorthand for anything small for some people now (even if the sizes are in the hundreds of microns).
Jesus Tits - STOP - Our bee numbers are already fucked up as it is. When you extract venom from a BEE, it KILLS the BEE, right now we NEED bees for other things like growing FOOD to EAT, not to be sacrificed instead to your clueless, moral-less ego and vanity! I don't really give a fuck if you CAN do it, you SHOULDN'T because it's WRONG!
Some people may want to harvest the bee venom themselves... but provided that most of people confuse bees and wasps, that may be dangerous (yes, Maya the bee is actually a wasp).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I can't say I know how the bees feel when electricity is applied to them so that they can produce the venom, but I can tell you that it wouldn't be pleasant.
In China and in Vietnam people "harvest" bear gall bladder juice by tying up live bears and inserting a tube into the bears - and that practice is deemed "cruelty to animal".
Should electrocuting bees be considered as cruel, as well?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
With this cosmetics discovery we are finally going to see some real progress towards research and policy changes to protect against bee colony collapse.
It's made of components that are assembled at the nanotech level, so why isn't it? (asking the question genuinely as I suspect there's some definition for nanotechnology that we obviously don't know).
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Try buying Tritium. It's 85x the cost per gram of the Bee venom.
... that they'd have a potent toxin injected in them just to make them look a few years younger. Female vanity apparently has no bounds. Or at least we haven't found them yet.
I wonder if this could affect people with bee venom allergies.
My girlfriend has this type of allergy. In fact I had to rush her to a hospital last summer because she got stung.
If you add up the cost for an EpiPen, this is a very expensive cosemtic substance.
Colony collapse disorder? Failure of crop pollenation worldwide? The possible end of agriculture and mass starvations and food riots worldwide? None of that was important enough to save the bees.
But now, shit, the bees might be able to keep aging Baby Boomers looking young! Nothing can compete with that, the bees are SAVED!
First you have to know which compound of the venom are the active ingredient (a venom is not a single molecule, it's a big mix of lots of substances).
Maybe the important part are just small peptide (works also for small nucleic acid strands). In this case, yes: just slap the gene inside a bacteria or yeast and just harvest the thing in a huge brewery tank. This will cost a tiny fraction of the current method. (as in "a few bucks for a dozen of kilograms"). Washing industry thrives on this kind of process and has already made it fucking incredibly cheap (do you really think that the digestive enzyme in your washing powder where harvested from actual animals ?)
But maybe not. Maybe it can be a complex protein that requires some post processing (chaperone helping to fold it into an unusual shape, enzyme modifying some parts) - (but very unlikely. If the venom can cross the skin without injection, it needs to be something small). Or maybe it can be a small chemical molecule that is produced by a long and complex chain of chemical reaction necessitating a big collection of enzymes (very likely, given that it can easily cross the skin).
In this case you need to identify the candidate, understand the process that produce it (not impossible but it takes time), and then either put the whole machinery inside yeast (bacteria post-process a lot less their proteins) and go for the brewery-tank method, or replicate the synthesis in another way (produce the protein in bacteria and then do the modification in a lab. Or find a way to synthetise the small chemical compound by using a sequence of chemical reactions in a lab) and scale it up to industrial scale.
This *WILL* end up being incredibly cheap in the long term, but requires much more research and development.
There's a whole branch of science to study that, called "Venomics".
Until then, you're stuck at putting bee on a micro electric chair until they are so pissed of that they start stinging the glass.
(And I'm betting that perhaps, all the benefit come from the few traces of adrenalin-like substance that the bee end-up secreting after going through such predicament and of which a small part might end up in the venom itself).
But the fact that they extract only a gram from a whole hive, means that they are probably concentrating/extracting the product already, so they know already a few tips in which direction to look to find the interresting part.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nanotechnology, as I understand it, is about building entire machines out of atoms, on a nanoscale. This would allow us to interact with the world in a completely different way, for instance, physically ripping bacteria apart instead of trying to kill them with chemicals. So a cell phone doesn't fit the description: even though transistors can be measured in nanometers, the whole CPU, let alone the cell phone, is far beyond the nanoscale.
I'm not an expert. You could just read about it on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotechnology
The SoC is.
According to wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium commercial price of a gram of tritium is 30,000 USD.
Can someone top that?
Younger looking females are in more advantageous position in the mating process. On the other hand, older males are seen as more stable and more likely to have the means to support.
go stick their heads in a beehive
You mean the bit that previously read "pig" in the local language sunk even further into the ground and changed its meaning *again*?
Kinda cool but cheap compared to somethings that are out there: ie monoclonal antibodies that I used a few years back for some research US$700 per 100ug.
A quick search for bee venom brings up many suppliers offering it from 50$/g
even though transistors can be measured in nanometers, the whole CPU, let alone the cell phone, is far beyond the nanoscale.
And the photomasks used to make the aforementioned transistors are far, far larger than the end product.
Roundup doesn't kill the bees outright, but creates enough disabilities for entire hives to die off starvation.
Neonicotinoid pesticides tied to crashing bee populations, 2 studies find
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/03/29/10921493-neonicotinoid-pesticides-tied-to-crashing-bee-populations-2-studies-find
Beekeepers to EPA: We're running out of time
http://grist.org/food/beekeepers-to-epa-were-running-out-of-time/
It's probably great, until you develop a tolerance (and yes, you can... I did). I was stung SO much & so badly as a boy, so many times (10x in 1 leg once & 100's of times in a few summers):
After awhile, you don't "swell up" as much or as badly... thank the merciful Lord.
See here (tons of it on the web) -> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=%22bee+sting%22+and+%22tolerance%22&btnG=Submit&gbv=1&sei=RHvYUOWdB8q80AHCjoDACw
* My family's done bees since my grandparents & before that in Poland - for generations (my sis is into it now as a 'side job' afaik too, currently)...
2 things you NEVER do, which I will warn ANYONE on here:
NEVER wear cologne (or any STRONG scents) & never, EVER 'swat' at them first. They interpret that as an attack.
APK
P.S.=> You're OK as long as you "smoke the bees out" 1st, since they won't be able to get scent signals from the queen to "attack", which believe you me: THEY WILL once you mess with their nests!
(My grandpa used to load a 'bellows' with apple leaves & let it smoulder to do this), but IF you do the DUMB MISTAKE I did once (wearing strong cologne & not realizing it)? You're ASKING to get bit...
... apk
"We'll see who brings in more honey!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J2kc4oZTVU
Well, as a man I know that I do find the recession of my hairline somewhat disturbing, moreso than a few wrinkles etc.
The extra bulges in various parts is also somewhat of a concern.
I doubt I'm the only man with such concerns. Hair-loss is an especially-sensitive topic for many men.
I think you're speaking for yourself there pal.
The electricity is in fact used for halogen lights, and on the other side of the glass are some Queen bees in lurid poses. Not one of my proudest moments, having to clean the glass and collect the 'venom'.
Just goes to show, women will put anything on their skin to look younger.
Here is a useful GMO usage. Take the bee gene that produce the venom, implant it in some yeast or bacterial, and produce cheap bee venom from an incubator.
But here comes the dark side of GMO (well, one of them): either big pharma will patent the gene, or it will not happen
You can get it from this company for $150 for 10 grams. That is considerably less than the post.
http://beevenomsupply.com/get-samples
Although, you could buy 10 for $150, and then sell it for $3500 to vain girls, which is a considerable gain.