Beyond the Buzz: Uncovering the Healing Properties of Bee Venom

By Annie Adams, Paige Fuelling, & Magdalena Pujals

[1] Photo of a bee by Pimthida

Radioactive spiders have grown to fame after the miraculous transformation of Peter Parker in Marvel’s Spiderman. After being bitten, the spider venom provides Peter Parker with superpowers. Although Spiderman is fictional and there are no radioactive spiders that provide superpowers to humans yet, bees provide many super-services to human ailments and diseases. And no, these bees are not radioactive, but their venom can provide a natural, inflammation reducing effect. Bee venom has been examined by scientists in recent years to evaluate its usefulness in treating rheumatoid arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis, or RA, is a chronic inflammatory disorder that commonly affects joints as well as other body systems like the skin, eyes, lungs and heart. This form of arthritis causes inflammation that is associated with pain, swelling, and stiffness. Rheumatoid arthritis is one of the most common autoimmune diseases with prevalence increasing globally. Now, around 1% of the population worldwide has rheumatoid arthritis. Without proper management of this disease, serious functional disabilities may develop.

Doaa Mohamed El‑Tedawy and colleagues conducted research on rheumatoid arthritis and the inflammation reducing abilities of bee venom in rats. Bee venom contains various peptides, which are considered the “building blocks” of proteins. These peptides have been found to provide benefits for skin, muscles, and even weight. Already used in traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of inflammatory diseases and associated pain, bee venom is a natural alternative to drugs like methotrexate. Like bee venom, this option has reduced inflammation and pain which has led it to be a common treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.

The researchers were trying to find if bee venom injections were as successful as standard drugs for treating arthritis in rats. Using an animal disease model, the researchers induced arthritis in 20 adult male Wistar rats by injecting 0.3ml CFA into each right knee joint, and then controlled for it by injecting 0.3ml saline into each left knee joint, marking each injection point. Rats were arthritic if they experienced redness/swelling in a joint. The rats were randomly assigned to 4 groups: healthy, arthritic and treated with saline as a control group, arthritic treated with methotrexate to compare a standard drug against bee venom, and arthritic treated with bee venom (BV). Rats were given a standard dose of methotrexate and 60 mg/kg of BV, which was selected through a prior screening process. Injections started 1 day after induction of arthritis and lasted for 21 days. The researchers harvested the rats' joints to measure how much their joints swelled before, during, and after the experiment.

[2] Illustration of a lab rat

The researchers found that BV works as well as standard drugs in helping to reduce the effects of RA in the rats. Overall, bee venom reduced arthritis, reduced inflammation, and reduced pain for the rats in the experiment.

Although this study, and others, have come to these conclusions, these experiments have only been performed on rats. Before any conclusions can be made for the broader implications of the findings for humans, more research must be conducted, specifically testing BV injections on humans with arthritis. But, something that this experiment doesn’t account for is that the rats were induced with arthritis, whereas rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disorder that humans naturally develop. Therefore, the results of the induced disease experiment may not be transferable to a naturally-occurring disease in humans.

Although Peter Parker’s radioactive spiders and their intriguing transferable properties merely provide entertainment for humanity, there is hope that bees and their venom can help those who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis in the real world. However, the research conducted on their rats is only a stepping stone in discovering how BV can help humans suffering from RA.



Further Reading:

• Benton AW, Morse RA, Stewart JD. Venom Collection from Honey Bees. Science. 1963 Oct 11;142(3589):228-30. doi: 10.1126/science.142.3589.228. PMID: 17834840.

• Darwish, S. F., El-Bakly, W. M., Arafa, H. M., & El-Demerdash, E. (2013). Targeting TNF-α and NF-κB activation by bee venom: role in suppressing adjuvant induced arthritis and methotrexate hepatotoxicity in rats. PloS one, 8(11), e79284. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0079284.

• El‑Tedawy, D.M., Abd‑Alhaseeb, M.M., Helmy, M.W., & Ghoneim, A.I. (2020). Systemic bee venom exerts anti‑arthritic and anti‑inflammatory properties in a rat model of arthritis. Biomedical Reports, 13, 20. https://doi.org/10.3892/br.2020.1327.

• Kocyigit, A., Guler, E. M., & Kaleli, S. (2019). Anti-inflammatory and antioxidative properties of honey bee venom on Freund's Complete Adjuvant-induced arthritis model in rats. Toxicon : official journal of the International Society on Toxinology, 161, 4–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.toxicon.2019.02.016.

Media credits:

[1] Bee photo by Pimthida. License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
[2] Combination of Google noto 15.1 emojis. License: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/blob/main/LICENSE