Bee Venom Has "Botox-Like Effect," Is Worth 7 Times As Much As Gold

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Bee Venom Has "Botox-Like Effect," Is Worth 7 Times As Much As Gold

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 23, 2012 @04:30PM from the not-sure-smart-money-is-the-right-word dept.

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."

37 of 248 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Botox by kimvette · 2012-12-23 16:37 · Score: 5, Informative

FTFS:

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.

--
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
7 times the price of gold? by Roger+W+Moore · 2012-12-23 16:38 · Score: 5, Funny

I think we've finally found the real reason why honey bees are disappearing.
1. Re:7 times the price of gold? by Dr_Barnowl · 2012-12-24 01:00 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Bees die when they sting humans at least - their sting is barbed and they can't get it out, so the injuries they receive when they rip part of their butt off are fatal. It only applies to animals with a thick skin/
  If this membrane is tough enough, they won't be able to penetrate it, and their stinger will stay on. It would also work if it's weak enough to pull the stinger loose.
Re:Botox by dmacleod808 · 2012-12-23 16:38 · Score: 4, Insightful

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin#Links_to_deaths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin#Side_effects

--
There Can Be Only One...
Re:Botox by calzones · 2012-12-23 16:46 · Score: 4, Insightful

Why female skin is a more apt question.
Does it not work for guys or is it an assumption that guys aren't interested in looking younger?

--
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
Re:Botox by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-23 16:47 · Score: 5, Insightful

This is Slashdot. We have a proud tradition of not reading the articles, summaries, or even headlines, and then spouting inaccurate, misinformed idiocy and feeling smug about what "experts" we are.
Correct me if I'm wrong by theIsovist · 2012-12-23 16:48 · Score: 3, Insightful

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?
1. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by Zomalaja · 2012-12-23 16:55 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  http://www.abeeco.co.nz/shop/Bee+Venom+Products.html
  "To extract the Bee Venom a pane of glass is placed along side the hive and a small electrical current is run through it, which encourages the bees to sting the surface. The bees are not harmed in the process."
2. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by Cochonou · 2012-12-23 21:53 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  It seems that preying mantis cannibalism during sex happens much less frequently in the wild than in captivity.
3. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by loufoque · 2012-12-23 23:16 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  It's the Big Brother effect.
  Women go crazy when on camera.
Re:Does it kill the bees??? by IonOtter · 2012-12-23 16:48 · Score: 4, Informative

No, the bees just get really pissed off by the current, and it encourages them to sting the glass.
Per the video, you can "harvest" every two weeks.

--
[End Of Line]
i apologize in advance by alienzed · 2012-12-23 16:50 · Score: 3, Funny

leave them bee!

--
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
This has been tried before by Fyzzler · 2012-12-23 16:51 · Score: 3, Interesting

What could possibly go wrong

--
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
price comparison by swell · 2012-12-23 16:53 · Score: 4, Insightful

"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...
Re:Botox by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-23 17:05 · Score: 3, Interesting

Considering the price of the active ingredient i think it's fair to assume that the quantities in any anti-ageing product will be about as effective as any current venomless skin cream, maybe they feel that, since women are already very used to convincing themselves of the efficacy of some made up or at least utterly useless new wonder molecule they're also most likely to feel the effects of any bee venom branded moisturisers.
What does gold have to do with this? by Demonantis · 2012-12-23 17:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
Re:Can't we just 3D print it? by LoverOfJoy · 2012-12-23 17:32 · Score: 5, Funny

And you thought bee venom was expensive? Just wait until you see the prices of HP 3D Printer Bee Venom Cartridges.
The HORROR... by Frosty+Piss · 2012-12-23 17:38 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
Lolwut by Psicopatico · 2012-12-23 17:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:Price comparison chart by IHC+Navistar · 2012-12-23 18:04 · Score: 3, Funny

I need clarification on your proposed measurement #3.
By 'Members of the Senate", do you mean:
a) The value of their lives (What the rest of us would be losing if they were to magically disappear in a Harry Potter-esque manner),
b) Their value to the rest of us (What we gain from them per capita versus what they take from us),
-or-
c) What it costs to buy one (What needs explaining?!)

--
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Re:Not for long by Sulphur · 2012-12-23 18:29 · Score: 3, Funny

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.
I thought getting shitfaced meant something else.
Gender-specific venom action ? by vikingpower · 2012-12-23 18:33 · Score: 3, Insightful

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
Re:And more importantly by taxman_10m · 2012-12-23 18:34 · Score: 5, Funny

No. The beard gets in the way of the neck.
Pssst...... by rts008 · 2012-12-23 19:11 · Score: 3, Funny

*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
A small correction by jandersen · 2012-12-23 19:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Re:Does it kill the bees??? by bwcbwc · 2012-12-23 20:24 · Score: 3, Informative

Hmmm, I was going to say that bees die when they sting. But that's because normally the stinger gets hooked in the victim and the bee's abdomen ruptures when the stinger is pulled off. If they're stinging glass, I suppose it's possible they could survive the experience because the stinger wouldn't get stuck.

--
We are the 198 proof..
Would that be considered cruel ? by Taco+Cowboy · 2012-12-23 20:37 · Score: 3, Insightful

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 !
1. Re:Would that be considered cruel ? by samoanbiscuit · 2012-12-23 21:26 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Not only this, but being arthropods with considerably more primitive nervous systems than mammals, it's yet to be determined if they (insects) even feel pain the same way we do. The reason why mammals such as bears and dolphins seem "cuddly" is because our close evolutionary heritage show characteristics in common between species that elicit a protective and nurturing instinct even between species. Naturalists have filled pages and pages full of anecdotes of mammalian predators who have spared and even gone on to raise young mammals of their prey species; the nurturing instinct is strong and not very discriminating.
2. Re:Would that be considered cruel ? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-23 21:51 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Does it matter? It's wrong anyway, and especially so since it's not even necessary. Doing this kind of thing should be illegal if it's for cosmetic purposes and/or to make people look/feel better.
3. Re:Would that be considered cruel ? by smooth+wombat · 2012-12-24 03:56 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  They do not feel a thing. Insects lack a central nervous system, which is needed to have ability to feel what is happening to remote parts of your body.
  
  Not so fast. You might want to reconsider that thought, especially when the dance of bees were studied and how it relates to their central nervous system.
  
  Then there is the anatomy of a bee which shows its nervous system.
  
  Obviously bees feel pain. The question is to what extent compared to mammals.
  
  --
  We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
4. Re:Would that be considered cruel ? by OneAhead · 2012-12-24 11:19 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I used to think like you when I was a kid. Then I discovered reality is more nuanced and the science on this is surprisingly soft.
  Nervous system morphology: yes, arthropods' nervous systems surely looks different from ours, with one large ganglion in the head and multiple somewhat smaller ganglia controlling motoric and digestive functions. But to conclude from this that they can't possibly feel pain is a huge leap of logic. An insect brain is organized much like a crustacean's brain, and a crustacean's brain is capable of complex behaviour. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=clever-crustaceans
  Nervous system organization: suppose you want to argue that our nervous system not only look different, but is organized differently, with everything centralized, as opposed to different ganglia taking care of different functions. Well, the differences are not that huge. Have you ever seen a freshly beheaded chicken? I can tell you, some of them run like hell - a sight so spooky that you won't easily forget it. This is because the act of running originates from the spinal cord, which is still there when you cut off the head. Similarly, it is speculated that the human spinal cord plays an important role in coordinating monotomous tasks such as walking. And the number of neurons associated with coordinating our digestive tract is larger then the number of neurons in a rat, and comes surprisingly close to the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex of a dog.
  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gut-second-brain
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons#Cerebral_cortex
  That bring us to Nervous system size. The above shows that a large structure of neurons is no guarantee for intelligence. On the other hand, there are many studies showing that corvids like crows and magpies show surprisingly intelligent behaviour on a smaller budget of neurons than our digestive system or a dog...
  My point of all this is that neither brain size nor morphology or organization necessarily equates to complexity of function.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates#Central_nervous_system
  What does, then? We do not know! And we know even less whether bees can feel pain; nobody ever became a bee and wrote a book about it. The thought of not knowing this might feel threatening to your ethical preconceptions, but it's the hard truth! To make matters worse, the more we learn, the more it looks like some if not most invertebrates are able to experience pain at some level. Funny that we were just talking about administering electric shocks to honeybees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates#Conditioned_suppression
  Now the interesting question is: how to build a system of ethics on this (lack of) knowledge. This I cannot answer for you, but the solution I use for myself is attributing gradual weights to the torture of different animals, with molluscs falling into the lowest tier, small insects a bit higher, large crustaceans a bit higher, birds and small mammals a bit higher and "intelligent" mammals even higher. The most important element of my system of ethics is that even the lowest tiers have a nonzero weight and torturing them for no good reason should be avoided.
  Regardless of all the above soft ethics, there's a hard reason why "bee-tox" is a horrible idea. There already is a shortage of honeybees to the extent that fruit farmers start worrying about pollination:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co
Re:Botox by TeknoHog · 2012-12-23 20:57 · Score: 3, Funny

"My balls are as smooth as pearls, and you know how much women love pearls"
Not to mention their love for the necklace you can make with them.

--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Praise be by Swampash · 2012-12-23 22:45 · Score: 4, Insightful

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!
Re:Botox by DarwinSurvivor · 2012-12-23 23:00 · Score: 3, Funny

I'm trying really hard to figure out if you got whooshed...
Not quite as simple by DrYak · 2012-12-23 23:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

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 ]
Re:Most men arn't so vain and insecure... by mellon · 2012-12-24 01:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

No, men are vain and insecure in completely different ways, because they have spent their lives being judged for things other than their beauty.
Re:Botox by kimvette · 2012-12-24 03:34 · Score: 4, Informative

It's far too expensive for mass consumption, not easy to mass produce, and to get this to bring in big money you'd have to be able to synthesize it somehow with process that can be used to mass production.
I disagree. People spend money on gold facial masks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Tmycixsh8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLrurC4dtUY
and some idiots pay for silver facials and gels, which will actually result in argyria (turn your skin blue - literally) if you do it too many times:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhQgFc_bec4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDW799FhVJ0
Examples of argyria:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahihGKZC5Kk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnXdk3Kmq9s
Now granted those are some extreme examples, but ever notice many women's earlobes have a small greyish spec at the bottom of the piercing? This is from silver compounds being absorbed into the skin. Same thing.

--
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50